By Kyle VanHemert
All Google wants for Christmas is a bunch of scary ass robots. Clearly, the big ticket items under the tree are Big Dog and the rest of the Boston Dynamics nightmare menagerie. But if Larry and Sergey are still looking for a stocking stuffer, this freaky balancing cube might be just the thing.
Cubli, a project out of the Dynamic Systems and Control lab at the Swiss engineering school ETH Zurich, is a 6 inch by 6 inch metal block that employs three spinning wheels to perform a variety of tricks. Its creators humbly tout its ability to “walk,” using angular momentum to flip itself from face to face. This feat was kinda cute when MIT’s diminutive M-Blocks were doing it. Here it’s a little more unsettling.