UH OH Self-Assembling Robot Crawls Off Drawing Board

US researchers, inspired by the Japanese paper folding art of origami, have developed a “Transformer” robot that can assemble itself from a flat sheet and crawl away, without human intervention, reports FT.

The self-folding prototype, described in the journal Science, was devised by a joint team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University. Rob Wood, a Harvard engineering professor who was one of the project leaders, said: “Getting a robot to assemble itself autonomously and actually perform a function has been a milestone we’ve been chasing for many years.”

(ht Felix Bronstein)