• The new system consists of intricate, sizable, and useful structures.

• It is composed of many tiny, identical building blocks known as voxels.
• A string of several voxels linked end to end makes up the robots.

MIT engineers have created a special robot that can self-assemble and produce 'virtually anything' as the world transitions from a human-dependent workforce to robotic hands. The robots have the ability to grow into larger robots and assist in creating structures and vehicles.

The team wants to create robots that can economically manufacture practically anything, even objects that are considerably larger than themselves, like buildings, cars, and larger robots. The Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) at MIT has been in charge of the effort and has been researching the novel technology for years. 

They recently showed how to assemble deformable aeroplane wings and working race cars out of tiny, identical lightweight pieces. They also showed how to create robots to help with some of the assembly. A report describing their findings was released in the journal Nature.

They presented a discrete modular material-robot system capable of serial, recursive, and hierarchical assembly (making bigger robots). To do this, the construction is discretized into a feedstock of straightforward, basic building blocks that can be rearranged to create a variety of functionality. 

While experts stress that a fully autonomous system capable of both choosing the optimum construction sequence and assembling larger structures, including larger robots, is still years away, the most recent work moves them one step closer to that reality.

 The new system is composed of intricate, substantial, and useable structures formed of a variety of tiny, identical subunits known as voxels. The team has created complex voxels that can transport power and data from one unit to another, whereas earlier voxels were only mechanical structural components.