BIRDS and bees do it – now machines can reproduce too. The first scalable robot to have built an exact copy of itself could herald a fundamental rethink of how robots may be used to explore other planets.
Hod Lipson and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, built their self-replicating device using small mechanical building blocks that can swivel, and also attach themselves to one another using electromagnets.
Each 10 centimetre cube contains a microprocessor, and they are all equipped with an identical set of instructions that tell the block how to connect and swivel, depending on the way…
