‘Terminator’-Style Cube Robots Swarm And Self-Assemble — video included

by Terry Wilson
Canadian Awareness Network
October 5, 2013

By: Amanda Kooser
cnet.com

If you look down and see a series of colorful cubes crawling toward you, don’t panic. It’s not Tetris come to real life, but rather the creation of robotics researchers at MIT. The M-Blocks robots are cube-shaped modular bots with no external moving parts. Nonetheless, they can move, crawl over each other, and self-assemble.

The secret to the robots’ movements lies under the skin. Each little cube hides a small flywheel that can hit speeds of 20,000 revolutions per minute. Magnets embedded in strategic locations help the M-Blocks stick together.
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