A team of researchers from Professor Daniela Rus’ Distributed Robotics Lab has developed a new type of self-assembling, jumping, flying rolling, modular robot called M-Blocks. The robots, “are cubes with no external moving parts. Nonetheless, they’re able to climb over and around one another, leap through the air, roll across the ground, and even move while suspended upside down from metallic surfaces,” wrote Larry Hardesty for the MIT News Office.
“Inside each M-Block is a flywheel that can reach speeds of 20,000 revolutions per minute; when the flywheel is braked, it imparts its angular momentum to the cube. On each edge of an M-Block, and on every face, are cleverly arranged permanent magnets that allow any two cubes to attach to each other.”
“Inside each M-Block is a flywheel that can reach speeds of 20,000 revolutions per minute; when the flywheel is braked, it imparts its angular momentum to the cube. On each edge of an M-Block, and on every face, are cleverly arranged permanent magnets that allow any two cubes to attach to each other.”
Read the full article here and check out the video explaining how M-Blocks work below.