“MIT researchers have developed a lightweight structure whose tiny blocks can be snapped together much like the bricks of a child’s construction toy. The new material, the researchers say, could revolutionize the assembly of airplanes, spacecraft, and even larger structures, such as dikes and levees.”
Because using this system to fabricate real-world structures only becomes practical when you have robots to do the assembly, I would term it a trasformational application of robotics, which is to say designing and making use of robots to enable a better approach.
See on web.mit.edu