Science has published a paper from a team of researchers at MIT and Harvard University who have created a robot that can, starting from a flat position, fold itself up into a complex robot that can walk and turn. The robot self folds in about four minutes and walks away at a speed of more than 2 inches per second. It folds, walks and turns without human intervention. No other self-folding robot can function like this without extra intervention.
"The exciting thing here is that you create this device that has computation embedded in the flat, printed version," said Daniela Rus, 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."
This new technology paves the way for these types of complex robots to be produced quickly and be scalable.