MIT’s Self Sculpting Sand Robots, ‘Smart Sand’, that Can Assume Any Form

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT is developing self-sculpting sand, or ‘smart pebbles’, or ‘smart sand’, that can assume any form to come up with new tools. This was reported at MIT’s website.

The research project at the Distributed Robotics Laboratory (DRL) will be presented in May at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

According to MIT:

“Unlike many other approaches to reconfigurable robots, smart sand uses a subtractive method, akin to stone carving, rather than an additive method, akin to snapping LEGO blocks together.”

Co-author Daniela Rus said that:

“We’d like to know ahead of time what our block looks like.”

The smart sand are cubes about 10 millimeters, accompanied ‘with rudimentary microprocessors inside and very unusual magnets on four of their sides,’ MIT further revealed.