https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQf0qsRTsoA&feature=player_embe...

Thanks to a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) – the Pentagon’s research agency behind mind-bending projects like weaponized hallucinations – the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has begun to develop miniature robots that may eventually pave the way for something like the fictional Transformers.

DARPA getting behind this type of research is hardly surprising given their new focus on robots that can approach human beings in their efficiency, increasingly life-like humanoid robots, cheap robots capable of changing apparent shape and temperature, unbelievably fast legged robots, mind-controlled robots, etc.

In a recent MIT press release, they characterize their newly developed reconfigurable robots as the “robot equivalent of a Swiss army knife” since this technology could have a wide range of uses. The researchers dubbed the tiny robots milli-motein, which is described as “a name melding its millimeter-sized components and a motorized design inspired by proteins, which naturally fold themselves into incredibly complex shapes.”

Indeed, as you can see in the below video, the design, conceived by Neil Gershenfeld, head of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, visiting scientist Ara Knaian and graduate student Kenneth Cheung, is quite clearly inspired by proteins, thus giving the tiny robots potentially limitless applications: