Researchers at MIT's Centre for Bits and Atoms are putting their hard efforts into an ambitious project, designing robots that effectively self-assemble. The team feels that the goal of an autonomous self-building robot is not much easy to achieve but the work in this field, thus far, demonstrated positive results. At the system's centre are voxels (a term borrowed from computer graphics), which carry power and data that can be shared between pieces. The pieces form the foundation of the robot, grabbing and attaching additional voxels before moving across the grid for further assembly.

The researchers note in an associated paper published in Nature, mentions "Our approach challenges the convention that larger constructions need larger machines to build them, and could be applied in areas that today either require substantial capital investments for fixed infrastructure or are altogether unfeasible." Coming up with the proper level of intelligence for these Self-Building Robotic systems is a big hurdle. Among other things, the robots need to determine how and where to build, when to begin building a new robot, and just generally how to avoid bumping into each other in the process.

Along with there are many hardware issues. The team is currently working on building stronger connectors to keep the voxels together. Researchers say soon they will come up with the solution to these problems and will successfully develop robots that Effectively Self-Assemble.