MIT fuses best of Legos & Transformers into shape-shifting building blocks
When you were a child, Lego offered the exciting imaginative play of building the shapes of buildings, devices, or robots. Transformers toys manifested the imagination even more fully, with vehicles that metamorphosed into robots and vice versa. But of course, neither Lego nor Transformers could do what actual buildings, devices, or robots could do.
But now a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has created “bifur-circuit” 3D-printed smart modules that can connect while shifting between myriad shapes without disrupting the electric connections that keep their customizable mechanical functions working.
Shape-shifting is an extremely valuable design principle, not only to produce a range of convenient geometries suiting different circumstances, but to provide a strong grip without crushing whatever (or whomever) is being gripped, and for use in disaster conditions and even as extraterrestrial habitation.
Because of their collective transformability, the MIT bifur-circuits allow designers rapid improvement from one...
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