MIT Deploys Swarm of Self-Assembling Robot Cubes

We started to get just a little bit nervous last spring, when Daniela Rus and Kyle Gilpin from MIT introduced something called “smart sand.” Smart sand was a pile of tiny little robotic cubes endowed with the capability ofautonomously replicating any 2D shape that you poured them over. The only reason we’re not all robots right now (we’re pretty sure we’re not, anyway) is that smart sand couldn’t move by itself: you had to shake it around a bunch to get it to do anything. For some reason, MIT has decided to remove that safety feature by developing a version of smart sand THAT CAN MOVE ALL BY ITSELF. [Read More]