Researchers have developed small robots that can work together as a collective that changes the shape and even shifts between solid and ‘fluid-like’ conditions-a concept that should be known for all who still haunt through nightmares of the T-1000 Robot Assassin of “Terminator 2.”

A team led by Matthew Devlin of UC Santa Barbara described this work in A paper recently published in scienceand write that the vision of “coherent collective robotic units that can arrange in virtually any form with any physical characteristics … has long been interested in both science and fiction.”

Otger Campàs, a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biology and Genetics, told Ars Technica That the team was inspired by tissues in embryos to design robots with similar abilities. These robots have motorized gears that enable them to move around within the collective magnets so that they can stay attached, and photod tectors that allow them to receive instructions from a flashlight with a polarization filter.

Campàs said reality remains ‘far from the Terminator -thing’, with size and power challenges that remain. The researchers’ robots were slightly more than 5 inches in diameter, although the goal is to get it down to 1 or 2 inches, or even smaller.