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Engineers at Harvard University have developed a robot that assembles itself into a complex shape in four minutes and then crawls away without any human intervention. It was inspired by origami and a classic children’s toy.

Oakland University is located a few minutes away from Chrysler’s corporate headquarters in Auburn Hills, MI. So, it’s appropriate that the school is home to the Fastening and Joining Research Institute (FAJRI), the only facility of its kind in the world.

Being green and sustainable is trendy in all industries today. Unfortunately, many different definitions and concepts exist, which can be confusing to small- and medium-sized companies.

By redesigning multipart components, such as fuel nozzles, ducting and valves, into one-piece components, engineers can reduce weight, simplify assembly and cut costs.

As U.S. furniture manufacturers revamp domestic production after more than a decade of offshoring, they need help implementing state-of-the-art assembly lines. Many of those companies are seeking assistance from the Franklin Furniture Institute at Mississippi State University.

Wichita, KS, calls itself the Air Capital of the World. The city has a long, proud heritage of aerospace manufacturing.

Rochester, NY, is home to several well-known companies, such as Bausch & Lomb, Eastman Kodak and Xerox. It’s also home to cutting-edge electronics manufacturing research, thanks to the Rochester Institute of Technology Center for Electronics Manufacturing and Assembly (CEMA).

The University of California-Berkeley has been center stage for new ideas, breakthroughs and radical changes for decades. Today, it’s leading the green manufacturing revolution. Cal Berkeley is home to the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sus-tainability (LMAS).

Compliant mechanisms are jointless, elastic structures that reduce costs and simplify product designs. These single-piece flexible structures elastically deform without joints to produce a desired functionality.

The facility was created by Lipson in 2001 to develop robots that “create and are creative. We explore novel autonomous systems that can design and make other machines automatically,” he points out.