May 31, 2014 10:16 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed robots that can be printed and that self-assemble when heated.

According to NBC News, these robots come flat from a 3-D printer on a plastic material like what Shrinky Dinks are made of before being placed in between two sheets of either Mylar or polyester. After careful cutting, they go in the oven and assemble themselves into their robot form.

Daniela Rus, a professor in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, said the only limit to how big these robots come is the size of the oven.

"If you have a printer at home and some scissors, you could in principle take the design files from our software and cut out your own robot," she told NBC News.

Currently, her team is only printing mechanical parts and then adding electrical parts afterward, but she said her method could be adapted to produce medical equipment, toys and more.

"We have this big dream of the hardware compiler, where you can specify, 'I want a robot that will play with my cat,' or 'I want a robot that will clean the floor,' and from this high-level specification, you actually generate a working device," Rus said in a news release. "So far, we have tackled some subproblems in the space, and one of the subproblems is this end-to-end system where you have a picture, and at the other end, you have an object that realizes that picture. And the same mathematical models and principles that we use in this pipeline we also use to create these folded electronics."

The team has already written two papers on the new robots and next they will present at the annual IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. One paper is for the 3-D assembly from materials printed in 2-D and the other describes the addition of the electrical components.

"You're doing this really complicated global control that moves every edge in the system at the same time," Rus said in the release. "You want to design those edges in such a way that the result of composing all these motions, which actually interfere with each other, leads to the correct geometric structure."

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