Replicating Robot Builds Friends Out Of Foam

This is a video of a replicator that can "build" robotic compadres out of modular robot bits and spray-foam. I'm not really sure spray-foam is the best choice for a material to build robots out of but...wait. I take that back, foam robots sound like a great idea. That shit's flammable, son!

The Foambot consists of a basic wheeled cart, along with several jointed modules. The Foambot sprays these with the self-hardening insulating foam to connect them up.

The aim, says the bot's developers, is to create a robot that can deal with unknown circmstances - disaster recovery, intelligence gathering, troop support, planetary exploration and the like.

"Modular robots aim to address this requirement by having many modules from a small set of module types, that can be rearranged into a robot morphology to accomplish the desired task," they say.

Now before you all go questioning what harm a robot made of foam could really even do, consider this: one time I went to foam party in college and wound up getting some on my face and developing pink eye. My point is this: it's pretty obvious now I wasn't the only one peeing in that foam.

Hit the jump for a video of the thing making a quadruped robot which gets pretty scary looking around 2:10 when it starts moving.

Robot builds itself with foam [tgdaily]

Thanks to Jessica and Dredimus, who agree spray-foam is second only to craft paste in quality robot-building materials.

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