When you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but the world starts to look more interesting if your hammer can change shape.

For the builders of a class of robots called modular self-reconfigurable robots (MSRR), shape-shifting is the first step toward endowing robots with an animal-like adaptability to unknown situations. “The question of autonomy becomes more complicated, more interesting,” when robots can change themselves to meet changing circumstances, said roboticist Hadas Kress-Gazit of Cornell University.

Read the rest of this blog post at IEEE Spectrum: [html] [pdf].