There is more to the ckBot than meets the eye. This aggregation of 15 blocks moves with the grace of a toddler and looks like something designed by a 2-year-old. But when ckBot's creator, Mark Yim, gives it a swift kick, sending the pieces flying apart, the robot does something remarkable. The scattered modules flip over and wriggle toward each other, guided by cameras and internal sensors. When the blocks make contact, they magnetically latch together and-in an action eerily reminiscent of the liquid metal T-1000 cyborg in Terminator 2-reassemble themselves in their original form. Yim, a mechanical engineering professor at the GRASP lab at the University of Pennsylvania, says that his robot is one of the first fully active prototypes of a new kind of machine composed of what some researchers call smart matter: mechanical parts that can function independently and act cooperatively. One of the obvious applications of such research is military. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, is exploring how to endow robots and other military equipment with the self-sufficiency to function independently amid the explosions and changing landscapes of a war zone.
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机译：ckBot拥有的不仅仅是眼球。这15个区块的集合在蹒跚学步的优雅下移动，看起来像是2岁孩子设计的东西。但是，当ckBot的创建者Mark Yim对其进行快速的踢打，使碎片飞散开来时，机器人就做出了杰出的贡献。在摄像机和内部传感器的引导下，分散的模块彼此翻转并相互蠕动。当这些块接触时，它们会磁性地锁在一起，并且让人想起终结者2中的液态金属T-1000机器人，从而将它们重新组装成原始形式。宾夕法尼亚大学GRASP实验室的机械工程教授Yim说，他的机器人是一种新型机器的首批完全主动原型之一，这种新型机器由一些研究人员称为“智能物质”：可以独立运行的机械零件，合作行动。这种研究的明显应用之一是军事。美国国防部下属的国防高级研究计划局（Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency）正在探索如何赋予机器人和其他军事装备以自给自足的能力，使其在战区爆炸和多变的景观中独立运作。
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