https://futurism.com/the-byte/scientists-invent-flat-robot
A team of researchers at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have come up with an ingenious, origami-inspired robot that can turn itself into a huge number of three-dimensional shapes.
Best of all, it can fold and unfold itself like a piece of flat-pack Ikea furniture, which its creates say makes it an ideal candidate for assisting astronauts inside the cramped environment of a spacecraft.
As seen in a video demonstration, the bot — called Mori3 — can dexterously walk and pose with four flattened limbs, or even roll around once bent into a ring shape.
“Our aim with Mori3 is to create a modular, origami-like robot that can be assembled and disassembled at will depending on the environment and task at hand,” said Jamie Paik, director of EPFL's Reconfigurable Robotics Lab and co-author of a new paper published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence about the unusual bot, in a statement.