MIT Researchers Unveil Self-Assembling Robot Swarm 55
MIT research scientist John Romanishin, along with professor Daniela Rus and postdoc Kyle Gilpin, have demonstrated a swarm of modular robots with the ability to self-assemble into larger shapes. The individual robots are small and cubical, but they contain a flywheel capable of spinning at 20,000 rpm. By spinning up the flywheel and then braking abruptly, the robots use angular momentum to jump into different positions. Magnets on the edges of the cube guide them into alignment. The researchers hope to be able to shrink the cubes even further, but they think a "refined version of their system could prove useful even at something like its current scale. Armies of mobile cubes could temporarily repair bridges or buildings during emergencies, or raise and reconfigure scaffolding for building projects. They could assemble into different types of furniture or heavy equipment as needed. And they could swarm into environments hostile or inaccessible to humans, diagnose problems, and reorganize themselves to provide solutions." The cubes could also be packed with sensors, batteries, or other technologies.
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:3, Funny)
Grey Goo?
Re: What could possibly go wrong? (Score:3)
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self assembling != self replicating
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Yeah. That'll be a few versions down the road.
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Let's get any machine that can build a functional copy of itself, given the right materials before worrying about some specific machine doing it AND finding the materials itself.
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We already have a grey goo.
Life.
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Among the people who like to talk about it, the term for that is "green goo"
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Does that make humans 'pink goo?' They reproduce, spread rapidly and consume all available resources destroying everything in their path.
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I should probably say 'pinkish-brown goo,' in the spirit of political correctness.
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Beige Goo?
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Duh,
But the phrase sounded so goo in my head.
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, grey goo is the natural place to go with highly programmed, organization dependent, physically large devices that depend on highly specific materials for their construction. It's not like any one of those attributes would render grey goo essentially harmless.
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replicators
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blocks that self assemble == replicators
Yet.....
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Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Funny)
EVEN WORSE (Score:4, Funny)
We're talking about a Grey Lego scenario.
No feet shall be spared in the coming apocalypse
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We're nowhere close to building something on a nanoscale that can outcompete fungi or bacteria in digesting our world. We can't build anything like a housefly either (flies reasonably fast for much longer than many tiny toy helis, navigates, handles some suboptimal weather conditions, feeds itself, avoids enemies, finds mates and creates copies).
One might say someone will come up with a grey goo that eats steel (which most fungi and bacteria can't).
Oblig (Score:3, Funny)
I for one welcome our cubic-shaped robotic overlords...
just the first step (Score:1, Funny)
Prey... (Score:2)
Too bad Michael Crichton isn't still around, he'd love it - reminds me of his book "Prey" (I know, the subject's been covered by many other authors, but I like they way he wrote about tech)
Not surprisingly, things didn't end well for many people in that novel... not well at all.
Gold Goo (Score:2, Interesting)
What could possibly go right?
Gold Goo?
I mean why do we assume that something we create, if run out of our control, will be destructive? I imagine it is because the machines we have built in the past have always needed a human to tell them what to do - they have had little or no 'brains'. These dumb machines and creations if left to their own devices will run off the track, go haywire or explode. Humans have always been needed to channel the energies of these creations.
But now we have self-driving cars.
I thi
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I mean why do we assume that something we create, if run out of our control, will be destructive?
Because it is running out of our control...
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There's a difference between "out of our control" and "out of any control".
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"stuck driving in a circle" is very far from being out of control.
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"stuck driving in a circle" is very far from being out of control.
I think those watching the US Congress in action recently would disagree...
VOLTRON Lives!!! (Score:2)
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Project has come a ways since I last saw it. (Score:1)
I had an opportunity to play with a few of these about a year back. John is a weird old friend. :) Anyway, they were still fleshing out all of the AI bits at that time, but the mechanics seem to be relatively the same. It's a pretty cool project. I know they have an eye towards miniaturization in the future in order to make more complex structures, so you can all look forward to that.
wholeness (Score:3)
Too bad they didn't show any motion of the object as a whole, only of individual cubes.
other swarm self-ASM bots (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkvpEfAPXn4 [youtube.com]
http://naturalrobotics.group.shef.ac.uk/research.html [shef.ac.uk]
(Pay-walled articles) http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4108264&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D4108264 [ieee.org]
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11431-012-4748-2 [springer.com]
This is a pretty popular research topic nowadays. I have no idea why this MIT news is literally in every tech-blog on the net(other than their excellent PR department, I wished the PR guys in my university had the same enthusiasm...). I'm not trying to discredit them or anything, but while their approach is somewhat novel, similar results have been achieved in many different ways.
POWER (Score:2)
To do anything really useful they'll need to probably have more power than their batteries can provide.
A wireless beaming (microwave?) power solution might be usable for local use. For long distance (interplanetary explorer?) use perhaps having each face of the cube covered with solar cells with the ability to recharge their batteries for relatively short bursts might be the only solution.
It might be good to see if they could form antenna arrays for long distance control and communications.
Proposed name: (Score:5, Insightful)
Trillions.
(Obscure geek points to anyone who gets the reference)
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Self assembling alien nano-robots. I did a book report on it in middle school in 1989.
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The points are yours.
Seriously (Score:2)
Kinda nice. (Score:2)
I have a much better version of this that's immediately suitable for commercial and industrial apps. I suck at the funding part. Anyone want to donate or be an angel investor?
Next story... (Score:3)
Breaking Headline: "MIT Researchers Enter Secret Negotiations With IKEA"
News at 11
C'mon 7! (Score:2)