Just after posting the story, another user submitted a link to a story in The Register on the same self-replicating robots. It's pretty funny with choice quotes about the "apocalypse cube" such as "a Cornell University research team has developed a self-replicating cube which has the ability to assemble itself into civilisation-threatening configurations"...

Doesn't this thing remind you of the "CORE" cube robot nutter that always plagued the alt.robotics newsgroups for so long!

IT's hard for me to be impressed with this seemingly major achievement. I mean, this thing is a bunch of premade robot blocks! All this thing is doing is moving them into a various piles! This, in my opinion, can barely be called reproducing and the premade blocks can hardly be called raw materials. But, I guess symantics rules the day as they are using terms like "feeding trough" as the place where the robot can pick up more raw materials (premade blocks). All these terms (reproducing, raw materials, and feeding trough) are all stretching it a bit to claim their great achievement! I mean is it an achievement? I suppose it is, but again all the media coverage over so trivial an achievement? Wow! I mean I'm sure this thing is hardcoded to move these blocks into position and that's probably all it can do. So you start with X number of blocks and it produces, nothing. You still have X number of blocks. Lets put some metal and ICs, resistors, some batteries, a breadboard and a soldering iron in a room and when a robot can reproduce itself as a human would make a robot from real raw materials I'd be more impressed. At least have the premade blocks be in two (or more) pieces that have to be put together. But I guess, as with all robotics, we just take baby steps. Again, sorry for my lack of being impressed. Perhaps I should be more impressed but I'm not.

I'm gonna say that I greet this with a mixed bag. What they've done is alright, but hardly what's being claimed.

Okay, they're not making robots from raw materials. I've seen it mentioned that humans don't make humans from raw materials either. We get bacteria, plants, and animals to make building blocks for us. We just assemble them. <<cough>> semantics<<cough>>

As an exercise in modular/cellular/reconfigurable robotics this is er... alright. If we send a load of cubes to Mars then they can assemble themselves into lots of different types of robot. Looking at the way that they can revolve, I'd like to see them try to use outer blocks as wheels... The cubes mean that the composite robots can essentially repair themselves. However, the demonstration that we can see seems to involve the cubes clamping themselves to a special floor. For that matter, how come those spare cubes magically appear?

Someone on <HREF="www.oaps.org">Old Age Playstationers</A> noted that they look like chips. Personally I think they look well creepy.

Similar robots have been in development for some years now. I doubt that civilisation is at any real risk, but this sort of self-assembling technology will be very useful indeed. The obvious application is in the construction industry.

Traditionally assembling architectural structures such as houses or offices has been a highly expensive and labour intensive business. Provided that these robots can be made at negligable cost and are sufficiently robust they could be used to eliminate a lot of labour from the construction process. Just have a truck dump a load of these at the required site, then use a wireless network signal to program each cube with the necessary program and then leave them to it. Once the self-assembly process is completed another wireless network signal fixes the entire structure permanently in place.

If at some later date the council wants to drive a motorway through your house (Hitchhiker's guide style) a wireless network signal along with the appropriate security code is used to unfix and dissasemble the structure, and the cubes can then be completely recycled. It would be very straightforward and economical, with little or no waste.

Personally, I'm impressed.