A robot’s natural enemy is a flight of stairs. Climbing up and down stairs is something we as humans have pretty much mastered, but robots are finding it a touch more difficult. These M-Blocks, created by the brainiacs at MIT, would have no problem with stairs though. These modular robots can jump though the air, catch onto each other, spin and roll around to form new shapes, all with no external moving parts.

Our objective is to design self-assembling and self-reconfiguring robot systems. These are modular robots with the ability of changing their geometry according to task and this is exciting because a robot designed for a single task has a fixed architecture. And that robot will perform a single task well but it will perform poorly on a different task in a different environment

The cubes are able to move by spinning an internal flywheel at 20,000 revs/min and then suddenly stopping it. The flywheel’s momentum causes the cubes to launch into the air, climb up stairs, or jump over another block. The M-Blocks are fitted with moveable magnets, which allow them to latch onto one another and create shapes.

The researchers are currently building an army of 100 cubes that can all move independently in any direction, find each other and create shapes like a table and chair on demand.

[Source : YouTube, TechCrunch]