Researchers in the US are developing tiny robots that can assemble themselves into products and then disassemble when no longer needed.
These magnetic cubes, described as ‘smart pebbles’ or ‘smart sand’, could one day replicate an object by surrounding it, determining its shape and then joining together to form a copy or larger version of the object.
The roboticists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who have developed 10mm³ versions of the smart pebbles, have written a paper describing algorithms that would allow the cubes to talk to each other and work out how to arrange themselves.
via the engineer
