MIT Researchers Design A Chair That Can Assemble Itself

If you have ever purchased cheap furniture that you have to assemble at home, you know what an arduous processes building a table or cabinet can be. Researchers at MIT have designed some high tech furniture, albeit on a small scale, that can assemble itself. The prototype is a chair that can put itself together under controlled circumstances.

The tiny prototype chair measures only 15cm x 15cm making it sized for something along the lines of an action figure. The prototype was developed by researcher Skylar Tibbits and his team at the MIT Self-Assembly Lab. As you can tell from the image, the chair did have to be in a fluid for self-assembly to take place.

You can also watch the self-assembly in the video at the bottom of this story. To start, six white blocks are thrown in a tank of water with a current flowing through it. That turbulent water flow makes the parts flop around until they find the correct location and then they stick together.

It takes a while for the random interaction to result in the blocks being in the correct location, but once they are in the correct location they immediately lock together to form the tiny chair. Each of the six pieces has magnets with unique connection points that allows the pieces to connect to each other. That means that the pieces can only attach to their correct point.

SOURCE: Wired