Small cubes with no exterior moving parts can propel
themselves forward, jump on top of each other, and snap together to form
arbitrary shapes.
In 2011, when an MIT senior named John Romanishin proposed a
new design for modular robots to his robotics professor, Daniela Rus, she said,
“That can’t be done.”
Two years later, Rus showed her colleague Hod Lipson, a
robotics researcher at Cornell University, a video of prototype robots, based
on Romanishin’s design, in action. “That can’t be done,” Lipson said.