CONRO Configurable 'Lego' Robot

Trebor the Mad Overlord writes: "The CONRO project is an attempt to design robots that automatically build themselves out of small component modules and reconfigure themselves as needed. Sort of like Legos that build themselves. Interesting idea, just in the initial stages, but lots of cool videos on the site."

Comments

Miniaturization

[apsmith]

Something like this looks ideal for minitiaturization - thousands of copies of a single controllable element - who knows what you could make? You'd probably want to replace the batteries with a power storage system more easily controllable (and refillable) from outside; and all those control cables need to be somehow embedded into the interconnections between modules, rather than strung individually back to the controller. Hmm. An IP network architecture might make a lot of sense for control. Wired or wireless could work with something like this... Still, the concept of embedding everything you need in a single modular element is a great one - no need to sort parts!

Finally...

[dlc]

Someone ported make to run on Legos...

Re:It's "Luddite."

[QuantumG]

sure.. I think it's called "Slashdot poster".

Hello, Dr. von Neumann

[frankie]

CONRO isn't quite there yet, but it's definitely a step in the right direction (with the goal of replacing inefficient human forms with superior robotic life, of course). :-)

Self-replicating constructs are sometimes called von Neumann machines. It's a pretty cool idea that the popular media invariably links to Terminator (in the same way that all news stories about comic books must include Bam! Pow! or Holy [foo], Batman! in the title).

Also, here's a link to legal issues about artificial self-replication in case anyone was worried.

Re:But...!!!

[mickonline]

I think the most important thing is whether they can tip themselves all over the floor for people to tread on in the dark.

Cold as ice.

[Jedi Alec]

Major challenges include packaging, power and cooling as well as the major issue of programming and program control.

Now listen carefully, precious army of self constructing robots. Your first important mission will to assemble your own Peltier units.

Virtuosity

[QuantumG]

Woah! Ok.. I'll stop dissin' Xmas for killing Slashdot.. this has got to be one of the coolest items ever posted. These robots remind me of the great movie Virtuosity (well, I thought it was great, but I loved Hudson Hawk, The Arrival and Mission Impossible). In Virtuosity Russel Crowe plays SID 6.7, a psychotic virtual reality program that escapes into the real world using a nanotech based material. We are first introduced to this material when one of the researchers at this government run facility plunges a program crystal into a tub of blue stuff which quickly forms into a snake. Each (macroscopic) element in the tub is identical but performs a different function directed by the program in the crystal. A great movie that I highly recommend.

Configuration, not Replication

[Amigori]

When I first read the news bit, I thought, "Uh-oh! Someone's working on a self-replicating, AI-like robot." But upon further reading/perusing of the acutal site, they are building a robot that configure itself according a situation out of a finite amount of parts. That's cool. I can think of some scientific applications for this.

Slightly Offtopic Rant Ahead: I'm sorry. Some of the new technologies scare me. Yes, they will be developed with good intentions, but someone, somewhere will develop a sinister way to use it. Nanotech, Biotech, and AI are the 3 coming technologies that scare me the most. They all sound cool in some of the scifi books, but if you look at recent human history, the ones in power have a tendancy to destory and kill things. Hence my worries about those 3 technologies. Nanotech = Controllable nanovirus. Biotech = Controlling genes and DNA (ala Galactica). AI = Computers taking over (ala Matrix). My fears aside...

Amigori

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Humans have a tendency to destroy things.

Software based on Hormones???

[Alien54]

I saw this link on that page labeled "Second CONRO prototype - SOFTWARE based on Hormones".

This got my attention, so I checked it out. There are some movies on that page ranging from 6 megs up to over 60 megs. Definitely high bandwidth material. Not too much actual information though.

Of course, there are many obvious jokes and speculations you could go with here. For example, the last thing we need is an army of robots that need their medications

I did find some info elsewhere on the site.

Here is the abstract from one of the PDFs you can download on the Project Information page:

Abstract.

Self-reconfigurable, or metamorphic, robots can change their individual and collective shape and size to meet operational demands.

Since these robots are constructed from a set of autonomous and connectable modules (or agents), control of the robots and coordination among the modules are highly complex and challenging tasks.

The difficulties stem from the fact that all locomotion, perception, and decision making must be distributed among a network of modules.

This network has a dynamic topology, and each individual module has only limited resources in terms of computational power and local information about the topology in its neighborhood.

To meet these challenges, this paper presents a distributed control mechanism inspired by the concept of hormones in biological systems.

We view hormones as broadcast messages that trigger different actions in different modules, and exploit such to coordinate motions and perform reconfiguration in the context of limited communications and dynamic network topologies.

The paper develops a primitive theory of hormone-based control, and reports the experimental results of applying such a control mechanism to our CONRO metamorphic robots, along with the results of simulations.

This almost deserves a front page story by itself!