This work comes out of Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, which was not on my radar before today. Apparently just last week they released some even more impressive work (in the sense that I would not have thought it possible) on a self-folding mobile robot: http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/162/robot-folds-its...

The video of the robot self-folding (and walking away!) at about 1 minute in blew me away, highly recommended to anyone who missed this story last week.