Cynthia was excited not only to study how groups of robots work together and make decisions, but also to be part of a team that always kept a focus on how those computer science questions connected to the physical hardware involved. Again, two sides came together to connect the theoretical to the practical. Most hardware systems in distributed robotics are limited by the number of robots that can be built. They can be expensive, sophisticated, and even require special equipment to produce. Any research on large numbers of robots was done using computer simulations instead of swarms of physical machines. But what if you could fold robots out of paper? What if there were robots that could be cheap, fast, and easy to reproduce? Cynthia started working with a postdoc who had worked in micro-robotics, where folding was more common. They started experimenting with origami designs.