An FT Magazine feature visits the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, where professor Hod Lipson and his students are building "robot metabolism" — modular robots that can assemble themselves from simple parts, repair themselves, and, they hope, eventually reproduce. The lab's current building blocks are white plastic rods called "truss links" (developed by PhD graduate Philippe Wyder) and a new generation of triangles (master's student Sylvester Zhang). A paper in Science Advances last summer described what the group called the first robot system to grow from single parts into a full 3D robot while systematically improving itself — without external machinery. Lipson's life quest: identify "the 20 building blocks to make all possible robots", a deliberate parallel to the roughly 20 amino acids that encode biological life.

The context is that robotics has become AI's lagging twin. Large language models swallowed the hype, the capital and the PhDs; robots, Goldfeder says, "doesn't work yet", which is precisely what makes it interesting to this group. Lipson's thesis is that the next leap cannot come from bigger models: "the brains have moved forward, and now it's time for the bodies to catch up — in nature, there is never a mind without a body." The lab's exemplar project is "a machine that manufactures another machine, and that machine just walks right out". The commercial horizon Lipson sketches is radical: consumers would one day buy not a finished robot but a bagful of modular blocks that self-assemble into whatever task they are asked to perform.

The reality is less tidy. At Penn, Mark Yim — a pioneer of modular robotics — concedes that the 2000 promises of "versatility, affordability and reliability" remain unmet: "they can't do anything, they're super expensive and they break all the time." At MIT, CSAIL director Daniela Rus calls the reproducing-robot demonstrations "very simple as compared to the promise". Even so, the Columbia lab shipped a small victory at a weekly meeting witnessed by the FT: eight of Zhang's triangles wriggled millimetre by millimetre across a linoleum corridor, snapped into a snake, then split into two tetrahedra that folded themselves up — a primitive act of robotic reproduction. Source: Financial Times, 18 April 2026, Oliver Roeder.