Self-assembling Origami Robot is World's First Transformer - Sort Of

Origami robot folds itself up, crawls away
Prototype made almost entirely of printable parts demonstrates crucial capabilities of reconfigurable robots

For years, a team of researchers at MIT and Harvard University has been working on origami robots — reconfigurable robots that would be able to fold themselves into arbitrary shapes.

In the August 7 issue of Science, they report their latest milestone: a robot, made almost entirely from parts produced by a laser cutter, that folds itself up and crawls away as soon as batteries are attached to it.

"The exciting thing here is that you create this device that has computation embedded in the flat, printed version," says Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and one of the Science paper's co-authors. "And when these devices lift up from the ground into the third dimension, they do it in a thoughtful way."