Despite his robotics professor denying that his self-assembling modular robot notion could be a reality, what a way to prove a guy wrong, the former student John Romanishin, now holds a research scientist title in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His envisioning that robots could climb, jump and move without use of any external moving parts is now manifested. Presented last year at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, they are now known as M-Blocks. More than just accomplishing the idea that was once doubted, the robots could very well become a seriously helpful new technology in many ways.

These little robots are not only simplistic in their appearance but in operation. Built to be in cube form, with magnetic sides and corners, they are hollow and have no external moving parts. That does not stop them from their most admirable traits; climbing over and around one another, rolling around on the ground, leaping into thin air and even moving while suspended upside down. The one thing contained inside the cube is the flywheel, which can spin at speeds of 20,000 revolutions per minute! When the flywheel is in brake-mode, it lends it's angular momentum to the cube. On each edge and face of an M-Block is a perfectly arranged magnet which permit any cube couple to snap and attach together to form a single, movable component. Pretty amazing, isn't it?



For a while now, the modular robotics community has been pushing for such a conception. According to Daniela Rus, the professor who was proved wrong by Romanishin's invention, “We just needed a creative insight and somebody who was passionate enough to keep coming at it-despite being discouraged”. Despite the long time researchers spent perusing reconfigurable robots with an abstraction called “the sliding-cube model”, they were only able to get so far. A modular robot dubbed “Molecule” was developed, which consisted of two cubes and connected by an angled bar with 18 different motors. Something they were beaming about at the time, obviously difficult to even imagine M-Blocks back then.

Researchers are hoping to miniaturize the cubes to carry on with the utmost potential of these mini robots. Roboticists believe M-Block-like robots could be used for a variety of things, with the highest potential for droves of swarming cubes that can self-assemble. If you imagine the liquid steel from “Terminator II”, it should come together in your mind easily. More exciting is the idea of “cube armies” repairing or building (things like roads or bridges) in times of emergencies; or even raising and reconfiguring staging for building projects. Going even further, imagine them swarming into hostile or unsafe environments for humans to diagnose problems or report back what they may have recognized. Or the mobile cubes carrying cameras, lights, battery packs and other forms of equipment for those in need. Coolest part? Because of the community/attachment theme M-Blocks maintain, if one were to fall along the way, it can always rejoin the group. I wonder if Romanishin's professor ever saw anything like this coming. But, because the right person took hold of a “low-tech solution to a problem people have been trying to solve with extraordinarily high-tech approaches”, it makes you remember almost anything is possible.