Robot folds itself up and walks away

A team of engineers used little more than paper and Shrinky dinks™ -- the classic children's toy that shrinks when heated -- to build a robot that assembles itself into a complex shape in four minutes flat, and crawls away without any human intervention. The advance, described in Science, demonstrates the potential to quickly and cheaply build sophisticated machines that interact with the environment, and to automate much of the design and assembly process. The method draws inspiration from se...