Novel materials, 3-D printers and a new way of thinking about design could yield objects capable of assembling themselves and changing shape or function on command
The road to self-assembling houses and shape-shifting robots could begin with something as simple as plumbing. Today when we want to build infrastructure for moving water around a city, we take rigid pipes with fixed capacities and then bury them. And the system works well enough—until we need to increase the flow of water to an area or until a pipe breaks. Then we have to dig the whole thing up and replace it.
A nice alternative would be flexible pipes that could change shape on command or under the right level of pressure or pipes that could heal themselves in the event of a rupture. Advances in computer-aided design (CAD) and materials science are now making such pipes feasible. Those same advances and the new form of design that they have made possible could yield a world of programmable matter—material objects capable of self-assembling, morphing into new shapes or changing properties on command.
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