Engineers at Cornell University have designed this odd-looking machine that can rebuild itself and also could perform repairs on itself. These robots are very cool, they are designed to demonstrate the concept that robots could have the ability to self replicate. This particular robot doesn’t actually create it’s own parts, but it does have the ability to repair it’s own links if it were damaged. This concept shows that future robots will be able to remotely repair themselves even if they were in harsh environments where humans could not reach them. This particular robot design actually looks fairly simple, a single robot link is just a cube with the ability to rotate along a single plane. It just uses a small motor and a worm gear to rotate the joint. The links connect to each other when the electromagnetic is energized. The other metal contacts are most likely for serial data transfer and for knowing which orientation the cubes are connected to each other. These concept models most likely don’t carry their own batteries, but future designs could possibly carry their own battery power and be able to charge one another independently. If and when researchers start applying this same principle to nano technology there would be the possibility of actually having generic robots that can replicate into almost any other larger machine either permanently or temporarily. When that happens the field of practical robotics will be completely revolutionized. But even in it’s development phase, self repairing robots are revolutionary in themselves. Just imagine buying a bag of microscopic robots that could be programmed to permanently fix anything in your house. Just imagine going to the doctor and receiving an injection of generic nano robots that could rebuild your organs. Wouldn’t that be cool. 
