I. Omne vivum ex ovo

At the corner of 120th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in upper Manhattan, on the campus of Columbia University, stands a large but otherwise unremarkable building called Mudd Hall. Three storeys down, deep within its linoleum recesses, is a small laboratory. And in that laboratory is a desk affixed with a sign that reads “Robot Metabolism”. On shelves above the desk sit a collection of white plastic rods, the size and shape of sticks of dynamite.

On a painfully cold evening in January, two young men, Philippe Wyder and Judah Goldfeder, stood at this desk and took its inventory. They carefully examined the bone-white sticks. Inside each were two servo motors, a tiny chip, resistors, magnets and batteries. When these rods are set down, each can move in one dimension, extending and retracting, a bit like an inchworm. Many rods can attach, combine, assemble, assist, shed and replace. Robot, heal thyself.

A paper describing this system, on which Wyder and Goldfeder were co-authors, appeared in the journal Science Advances last summer. “We believe that this is the first demonstration of a robot system that can grow from single parts into a full three-dimensional robot, while systematically improving its own capability in the process and without requiring external machinery,” they declared.