MIT's Transformer Robots in the Making

Transformer robots are no longer only a science fiction we get to watch in the movies. MIT is developing a real life self-assembling robots and let me tell you the future in this department looks mighty bright.

The little moving cubes you are about to witness are called M-Blocks. They are a completely new kind of self-assembling robots currently in development at MIT labs. Cute little bots contain a flywheel that can spin at speeds up to 20,000 revolutions per minute which enables them to literally jump and flip across the table. On the outside they carry a bunch of clever self-aligning magnets used for attaching to their partner cube.

According to the team, this is only the beginning, in the future M-Blocks could be equipped with cameras or claws for specialized blocks that could be carried by their fellow blocks to other places to do other jobs. As the researcher John Romanishin explained in a report for MIT, "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". So I guess the real life Optimus Prime is just around the corner.