Self-assembly structures from moving cubes

John Romanishin and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said a new word in modular robotics.

M-Block robots are cubes with flywheels inside (at 20,000 rpm) and cylindrical magnets on the ribs. A flywheel develops such a kinetic moment that, after braking the cubes, the methods are not only rolling on the floor towards each other, but even spinning on the spot and jumping onto the “third floor”. For example, in the photo above, the white cube jumped to black. That is, these are the world's first mobile self-assembly robots without moving parts outside the body.

M-Block robots are suitable for testing various automated assembly algorithms. Each cube is capable of both individual and group movement together with other cubes.
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How can they be applied in life? In theory, armies of such cubes can repair bridges or buildings in emergency situations. They can be assembled into furniture or equipment of the desired shape. If we reduce them to nanoscale, then we get exactly the "liquid metal", which many have seen in the movie "Terminator 2".



A flywheel for 20 thousand revolutions is a key detail of the unit design. To compensate for the kinetic instability cylindrical magnets on the edges are used. When the cubes approach each other, the magnets rotate naturally and turn towards each other with opposite poles.

On each face of the cube there are eight more point magnets, which are used to precisely connect the blocks.

To date, 100 cubes and algorithms have been manufactured at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to control their movement. They want to experiment with a system of many hundreds of cubes that randomly move around the room, are able to identify each of the "brothers" and quickly assemble into structures like a chair, a ladder or a table.

The presentation of the scientific work on M-Block will be held at the international conference on robotics in Japan in November of this year.