A Self-Folding Robot

choi

Robert Lee Hotz, Art of Origami Inspires a Folding Robot. Wall Street Journal, Aug 8, 2014
online.wsj.com/articles/origami-inspires-self-folding-robot-1407434538
(next up: “Mr [Sam] Felton [of Harvard] and his colleagues expect to unveil another experimental origami device next week at an automation conference in Taiwan—a self-folding cube that is just five millimeters in length”)

My comment:
(a) “Inspired by origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, researchers have built a robot that can fold itself unaided and scurry away—a prototype of a flexible, self-assembling machine.”

Likely the “Japanese art” originated in China. See origami
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origami
(section 1 History)
(b) The video clip in WSJ.com comes from home page of Science.com. The paper:

Felton S et al, A Method for Building Self-Folding Machines. Science, 345: 644-646 (Aug 8, 2014)
www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6197/644