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Putting together these robots was, until recently, thought impossible.

“It’s one of these things that the [modular-robotics] community has been trying to do for a long time,” Daniela Rus, the MIT robotics professor overseeing the project told MIT news. “We just needed a creative insight and somebody who was passionate enough to keep coming at it — despite being discouraged.”

In fact, when Rus was first approached about the project by one of her students, John Romanishin, in 2011, her first reaction was dismissive.

“That can’t be done,” she said at the time. Romanishin is now a research scientist in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

What makes these modular robots unique from other modular robots is that the swarm of cubes can execute “non-static” changes. In older robots, all changes could be stopped in the middle of a shift from one configuration to another. The M-Blocks, however, can perform shifts where the motion from configuration to configuration is not-stable in the middle of the operation (for example, a cube can jump through the air from one attached block to the next). This allows the many configurations of the cubes to be significantly more variable.

“There’s a point in time when the cube is essentially flying through the air,” Postdoc Kyle Gilpin, who is also working on the project, told MIT news. “And you are depending on the magnets to bring it into alignment when it lands. That’s something that’s totally unique to this system.”