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.
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 think our robots will escape our control one day just as not so long ago we escaped the kings'. So I suspect that a future of self-creating machines will be more evolutionary than revolutionary and that there will be no, or exceedingly few, beheadings.