Self-reproduction is central to biological life for long-term sustainability and evolutionary adaptation. Although these traits would also be desirable in many engineered systems, the principles of self-reproduction have not been exploited in machinedesign. Here we create simple machines that act as autonomous modular robots and are capable of physical self-reproduction using a set of cubes. A physical system is self-reproducing if it can construct a detached, functional copy of itself — by definition, this will also be capable of self-reproduction. Self-reproduction differs from self-assembly, in which the resulting system is not able to make, catalyse or in some other way induce more copies of itself These phenomena have been of interest sincethe early days of computation, but have been examined mostly in abstract and simulated systems.
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