It'd be easy to do this in stop-motion animation; to do it unaided by human hands is remarkable. It's a robotic chair that falls apart and then reassembles itself.
As ever the sceptical type, I checked into the people behind the scenes and they seem eminently qualified. Raffaello D'Andrea, the leader of the bunch, has a c.v. longer than my arm in fields like electrical engineering and robotics.
In addition, he's currently at Cornell University, where another team of researchers developed a self-replicating robot. I blogged about it last year. (The link to a video seems to be timing out at the moment, so you might want to give it a try later.)
Some other projects he's worked on here.
(Some sound effects.)