MIT's latest robotic creation is a series of brightly colored cubes that change formation, according to the school's press release.
As you can see in the above video, the cubes can form any number of geometric shapes according to how they're programmed.
If the robot appears slightly unstable - even jittery - that's because it is. Previous models prioritized "static stability", meaning the machine would stay in place if paused. In order to simplify the design, John Romanishin, the research scientist in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory who developed the prototype, elected to eschew stability and rely on the power of magnetism, as per MIT.
"There's a point in time when the cube is essentially flying through the air," said postdoc Kyle Gilpin, who partnered with Romanshin in the design. "And you are depending on the magnets to bring it into alignment when it lands. That's something that's totally unique to this system."
All movement is based on a series of well-placed magnets, according to the press release. Romanishin's former robotics professor, Daniela Rus (who's still heavily involved with the robot's development) originally thought her student's design impossible - mainly because of its instability.
"I asked him build a prototype," Rus said. "Then I said, 'OK, maybe I was wrong.'"
"It's one of these things that the [modular-robotics] community has been trying to do for a long time," Rus said. "We just needed a creative insight and somebody who was passionate enough to keep coming at it - despite being discouraged."
It's also "one of those things that you kick yourself for not thinking of," Cornell's Hod Lipson, a fellow robotics researcher said. "It's a low-tech solution to a problem that people have been trying to solve with extraordinarily high-tech approaches."
The goal for Romanishin's design will be to minitiarize the "robot's" components, so that "hordes of swarming microbots that can self-assemble, like the "liquid steel" androids in the movie 'Terminator II'," according to MIT.
Yet, Romanishin's cubes, with some refinement, hold current possibilities. MIT envisions mobile cubes that could temporarily fix bridges or buildings during emergencies. Or cubes that could assemble into specific tools or furniture. "And they could swarm into environments hostile or inaccessible to humans, diagnose problems, and reorganize themselves to provide solutions."
Romashinins ambitions are just as grand.
"We want hundreds of cubes, scattered randomly across the floor, to be able to identify each other, coalesce, and autonomously transform into a chair, or a ladder, or a desk, on demand," he said.
