Uploaded October 2014 | Updated September 2026, 9 hours ago

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Researchers designed the first self-folding robot based on the ancient art of origami. This is how the robot does its trick, narrated by Natasha Pinol. The robot, created by researchers at Harvard and MIT who published their work in Science in August, is made of paper and 3-D sheets of polystyrene from the children’s art toy Shrinky Dinks. Embedded wires heat and shrink the material in certain places, allowing the robot to fold like a piece of origami or unfurl like a flower petal.

Read the full story discovermagazine.com/technology/origami-robots-enter-the-fold

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Credit: S. Felton, M. Tolley, E. Demaine, D. Rus, R. Wood. 08 Aug 2014. A method for building self-folding machines. Science. Vol. 345, Issue 6197, pp. 644-646. DOI: 10.1126/science.1252610

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