By DAVID DERBYSHIRE

Last updated at 22:26 12 March 2008

It sounds like something straight from a children's comic.

But British scientists will today take the first steps in an astonishing project to create the first real-life Transformers - the science fiction robots which can change shape at will.

The £4.6million experiment will attempt to build swarms of tiny robots, each the size of a sugar cube, that move around on their own and connect together to form larger, intelligent machines.

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Shape-shifters: The robots in the film Transformers could disguise themselves

Researchers say the first swarm of autonomous, intelligent, shape-changing robots could be in use within five years.

"They could be used in medicine, in space exploration and in search and rescue missions," said a spokesman for scientists at the University of the West of England in Bristol and the University of York.

"You can imagine dropping hundreds of these small robots into a crevice after a building has collapsed. They would find each other and maybe connect together to form a snake-shaped object that could wriggle through the wreckage.

"Then they could re-form into a spider to climb over a wall - or a robot with an arm that could lift rubble away. The possibilities are endless."

Each robot would have wheels or tentacles, allowing it to move around independently.

It would contain a small computer brain, making it as intelligent as an iPod or iPhone, and use infra-red to find other cubes.

Once connected, the cubes would be able to share energy and computing power, creating a machine with the intelligence of a computer laptop.

The scientists have yet to work out how the swarms would connect together. But their connections would need to double up as joints, so that the resulting larger machine could move around.

The Symbrion project, announced to mark National Science and Engineering Week, is funded by the EU.

The robots will also be able to manage their own hardware and software and will be "self-healing and selforganising", the researchers say.

Professor Alan Winfield, of the University of the West of England, denied that they could pose a threat to humans.

"The robots have functionality on their own, but they can also combine together or adapt and change as the situation requires," he said.

"The individual robots won't change physically, but they will adapt and evolve their functionality.

"Once the robots come together they will be more versatile - like a colony of cells such as those found in a jelly fish or a sponge.

"The different robots will co-operate to create the larger organism. In a sponge even if there is damage to some parts, the overall organism still survives.

"In this way the artificial robotic organisms might in theory become self-configuring, self-healing and self-optimising from both hardware and software perspectives."

The project has echoes of last year's Transformers film in which alien robots trapped on Earth disguise themselves as cars, motorbikes and lorries to wage war on each other.