Work is underway designing tiny robotic cubes imbedded with magnets on each plane that can create a duplicate of any object, either equal in size to the original or any size version as required.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Robotics department are currently working with two dimensional cubes of four sides, each cube containing a microprocessor with 32 kilobytes capacity and 2 kilobytes of working memory. All the cubes are linked in a flat chain mail form which when surrounding a pre set shape can pass a message to their neighbour which will then pass the information further along the chain allowing a second group of cubes to recreate the original pre set shape.
Further research will eventually make possible the same as described in 2D, but in 3D with a group of tiny 6 sided robot cubes surrounding an object, passing on the information to their neighbours to re create a replica of the three dimensional object surrounded by the primary group. Even better, the cubes can be endlessly recycled as when the duplicate object is no longer needed the cubes can be amassed back into a meaningless heap again.