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Smallest Autonomous Untethered Robot Ever Created
An anonymous reader sent in linkage about itty bitty research robots. Less then a quarter inch cubed, and includes a camera, microphone, and cute little treads. Includes cheesy picture of the robot turning on a dime. I guess if I had a few million of them, they could clean my living room or something, but for
now this looks like pure research and not much of anything useful.
The picture looks like the robot is turning on a quarter, rather than a dime. Not that it matters...
- harborpirate -
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
Of course, this requires that the robots become a bit more advanced, and actually include the sensors which are PLANNED, BUT NOT IMPLEMENTED YET.
-Llew "I've wrestled with reality for years, and, I'm proud to say, I won" Silverhand
What else could a small robot with cameras be used for anyway? The major application, in my view, is crime fighting.
Or dissident fighting, should the powers that fund so deign.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Well, considering they are a quarter-inch cubed, I can think of tons of extremely useful applications for these little guys. They have cameras and microphones... NSA anyone? How about the showers in a girls dorm?
I would love to get a few hundred of these.
wolf31o2 Developer, Gentoo Linux Games Team
As just one example, will your airborne device be flying into bunkers to locate stored chemical weapons? Will it fly under doors?
A future robotic ecosystem will have both insects and birds.
Ok, stereolithography was first launched in 1987--is fourteen-year-old technology really "new"?
-Llew "I've wrestled with reality for years, and, I'm proud to say, I won" Silverhand
Who says you have to be 15 to love one of those babies? I say, we get a bunch of them (like 15) and set up some wacky web cams. DORM GIRLS LIVE!!!!
For "CIA", read "Special Circumstances", if I read your user name correctly? ;-)
Seriously, though, it would probably be an NSA project, rather than CIA. Not to mention the fact that the CIA has too much trouble getting their act together. Or perhaps the FBI, which would be more frightening. Or maybe the TAA (TLA Assignment Authority).
It's a bird, it's a plane, no, it's SUPER Fly. No, wait, superfly has been done. The six million dollar fly? The bionic fly? If it could do marketing, I see a TV series in the offing... The problem, though, would be making the tiny super suits for the various insects. Very expensive.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Actually, by my (perhaps suspect) calucations .5 x .5 x .5 inches = .125 cubic inches (i.e. 1/8th cubic inches).
2/3" by 2/3" by 2/3" is a lot closer to the 1/4 cubic inches stated in the article.
Yeah it does.
Casca
Ok, fit the thing with a mini-camera and you have a sellable geek/voyeur toy.
...think "flea circus"
--
MailOne
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Dude, nobody's gonna be reading the article for at least half an hour.
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Technoli
Again, look to Stephenson's Diamond Age. The Toner Wars are what will happen. If you think you're bugged, design a hunter-killer to destroy any nanobot that it encounters. They're so cheap that it could be part of your home's security system.
So, if he was so right, how do you make a buck off it? If it's profitable, you *will* find a market.
The problem with suppressing technology is when it gets too fun for the technologists. Then they keep at it just to piss you off.
DB
Not useful? Remember, unthethered robotics is a near and expanding field. This kind of stuff is needed to get to the cool stuff.
If you think about it, your first 'Hello World!' program probably wasn't 'useful' by any conventional definition of the word, but it was a required step to learning how to do more interesting.
Combining untethered robotics with induction charging (so they can charge without having to use complex plugs or by flying/crawling past induction outlets) is the key here. Anything else requires putting the development of super efficient energy storage in your critical path.
I wouldn't mind having a small flock of fingernail sized robots circling me, charging via induction by swooping past my cell phone, and taking out mosquitos or bees that came within a foot of me.
Though if you used the ambient radio waves to charge a battery, you could probably use the free power to work at least one hour in 24. For some things (such as crawling back and forth in a pipe to check for flaws) that might be enough.
DB
I am familiar with crystal radios... what I meant was, what keeps this technique from being extended to other minute electronic applications, for example, a digital wristwatch? Or, why not run a whole bunch of these devices in series to pump up the juice? It just seems to me there must be some catch to pulling free energy out of the air, or everyone would be doing it.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Put a camera on these things, they'd render mirrors on the shoes completely useless. Call me crazy but this is a voyeur site's dream. A miniature robot with a camera, that could probably fit under a lot of doors and move fairly undetectable... Come to think of it, I want one now.
No, actually, you overfly and drop millions of them all over the city. They're cheap, simple, and everywhere. The enemy can't take the time to wipe all of them out because it takes too long to find them (they would hide themselves like bugs too)and the enemy's troop positions are being tracked often enough by surviving bugs that your chances of being surprised drop to very low.
DB
The Borg have invaded Earth!
Sure they're tiny -- but you just use *lots* of them. It would be even better if you could get them to reproduce and repair each other.
[ReidNews]
person:What happened to that building?
fireman:ohh, it was another one of them damn fusion powered spy bugs that went critical again, 3rd one this week.
Person: why do they keep doing that?
Fireman: they're all running WinCE, they segfault everytime that they fly by a microwave.
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Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
No more colonoscopy!
Seriously though, a while back I saw this bit on TV about this guy who implanted this little metal skeleton type thing on the outside of a cockroach. Then, by using electrical impulses to the fake skeleton, you could basically control the movement of the roach. At the size of a roach (which a lot of people know can get to anywhere) it would be extremely useful for exploring earthquake rubble and other disasters where search and rescue is inhibited by large chunks of wood and stone.
It's quite a step up from the Basic Stamp (http://www.parallaxinc.com), but unlike the Stamp, as far as usefulness goes, I think that it'll be a few more years before something really cool is born from this technology.
And they said zombies weren't real!
After contacting the Sandia lab, I learned that the robot does *not* have what I was calling a ROM processor. It has a PIC 16C77 microcontroller. Mea culpa. This should be an interesting project to follow!
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
There was a movie called Inner Space that dealt with shrinking a person in a machine and injecting them into another person, but I don't think that's along the same lines as you're talking about. The only other one that comes to mind are the nanities from Star Trek.
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
Yea, and checking out who's using Napster to download illegal mp3's, who's running a pirated ersion of Windows, that sort of thing. Also, all those junkmail companies have a new way of gathering statistics on people, no more buying mailing lists for them.
with cameras installed, crawling around Natalie Portman's dressing room...*drool*
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
The real question is can they configure a web server correctly and negate the slashdot effect.
:(
So far, it appears not.
BilldaCat
Don't forget the obvious usage of having a couple of these guys constantly reminding your boss that you need that new Beowulf cluster for a personal workstation along with a 250% raise.
wolf31o2 Developer, Gentoo Linux Games Team
There's also a HUGE difference between "a quarter inch cubed" and the articles statement of "a quarter of a cubic inch". The robots are really about 1/2" by 1/2" by 1/2", and not 1/4" by 1/4" by 1/4". This is off by a factor of 8!
** Martin
Does that give me the right to say, "i was just clearing the room of Bugs" if I fart? fine by me, let them flot away with the wind.
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
- tiny robot ballet / dynamic B&W bit-map images/graffitti (with tiny-robots as the bits)
- multiple simultaneous video-feeds of tiny nature (extreme close up + possible time-lapse + movement of grass growing, insects being born, movement over unusual surfaces, etc.)
usu. if you stop thinking about your long-term goals for five seconds and look at what you've got right now you can most always find something really cool.Actually I am talking about a '50s movie where a team of doctors and a ship are shrunk and put in a patient's blood stream to cure a brain tumour with a laser thingy. It was quite interesting.
I saw a show on the Discovery channel where scientists built a robotic bee that was so bee-like that it fooled the other bees. Basically it looked like a bee, and it imitated the movements of the leader, and sucussfully led the migration to different pollen fields. The bees fell for it as if it was one of them. Just thought I'd share.
Uh, how about spying on people who don't like the government? Once upon a time, the CIA & FBI had extensive files on John Lennon, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, not to mention pro-democracy groups all around the world. Why do you sound so happy that intelligence organizations might have this? I'm not comforted by the thought that I might express a negative opinion of Bush at a dinner party and have that fact noted in my permanent federal file ...
Do domain names matter?
. . . but they could also be used to deploy chemical and biological weapons. I mean, imagine that each one carries a little bit of something nasty, they distribute themselves widely in your enemy's position, then release their nastiness on command.
For that matter, why not have self-assembling land mines?
All this assumes, as others have pointed out, that these botlets ever become useful.
A core portion of the onboard memory could be used to store the basic OS with new functionality grafting on to the system as new robots are added (bringing with it more processing power and storage).
Now, I don't mean to imply that you would use a bunch of these things to do cryptanalysis, but rather than have a single dedicated controller machine, the OS could exist as a "hive mind", distributed piecemeal (think kernel modules) across multiple little bots.
An example: you've got a mini fleet of bots down at the bottom of the sea and you want to change their programming. Send down one new bot with new code and it will "infect" the system and update all other bots.
Just a thought....
-- "I am disrespectful to dirt. Can you not see that I am serious!"
Would this really work? If this is true, why can't electronic devices run themselves on ambient radio signals present everywhere? I guess it is a question of signal strength?
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
>What else could a small robot with cameras be used for anyway?
I'd use it to find the toys my son put down the bathtub drain. I'd like to take a shower without 5 inches of water in the tub.
The annoying thing is that it /would/ work, Tesla was *right*, and, as usual, greed and nastiness caused his work to be squashed....
Choice of masters is not freedom.
I love flying pig jokes!
Technology is only a vehicle. People are the ones that drive it.
To me, the concept of "pure research" is dangerously close to a bunch of geeks playing with their toys in a California lab... Then again, without "pure research" PARC never would have profited from the GUI interfa....oh yeah. Damn.
Was that out loud?
'Course, you'd have to surprise your target, this thing ain't exactly a pursuit model; it only moves at 20 inches per minute, or a little under 8 1/2 millimetres per second... reminiscent of the steamroller guy in Austin Powers :)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Subject says it all...
--Dave
Pure research useless? Boy, what planet you from?
These would be great to create a "live" command and conquer game. Strap a laser pointer for weapons and an infrared sensor for hit detection. Other unit detection would be the tricky part. So much more interesting to see these little bad boys running over terrain than a small screen of sprites.
Sig TBD
I see unprecedented possibilities for human mind control. One of those things crawls inside your ears or nose and latches onto your brain stem and *WHAMMO*. I'm serious, I swear, I saw something like this on Star Trek once....
you obviously have no natural talent for being a spook.
Indeed, the existence of these wee timrous little beasties ought to scare the bejezus, ( whatever THAT is), out of you.
kfg
My mini robot can target your mini-robot for a mini-smart bomb strike.
Who remembers the cockroach in 'Fifth Element' that transmitted the President's meeting back to the baddies?
Security concerns aside I'd *love* to have one of these guys to play with with a micro-camera/mic/xmitter combo. Drive it under the door and into your boss's office *while* you're working!
Also, with the smaller mass it's more feasible to build a flying or gliding robot.
"Like a fly on a wall" will have an entirely new meaning.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Those mysterious alien robotic roaches from the X-Files are only a year or so off. ;)
/.ers must not know what ROM processor circuits are. There is NO CPU. There is only a counter, a one-shot, and the ROM (plus maybe some I/O conditioning stuff). ROM processor circuits are good for very simple, repetative tasks like driving a stepper motor, but NO GOOD for tasks where any sort of computation or branching decision is made. They have thier place, but I'd hardly call them "robots".
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
omega_rob
Ahem. Do you read?!? Can you?
Garfield the cat says that people who can read, should!
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I guess if I had a few million of them, they could clean my living room or something, but for now this looks like pure research and not much of anything useful.
Yeah, and in the future I foresee the need for only three or four computers in the world...
Was that out loud?
Imagine, a veritable army of these things tending to your yard.
Put one of those drill thingies on the front and program them to look for termites and termite tunnels and launch a couple dozen around the house.
They could be programmed to go after June bugs, cockroaches, roly polies, spiders-- though they may be too quick for miniXtermiNaders.
They could them communicate with the others, using triangulation from other MXTN's and relay their coordinates and circle the buzzards and destroy the entire nest. YeeHaa!
Actually, that triangulation idea is a great one. They could create a little miniature wireless network, relaying info to the others. Kind of like tiny little Borg's running around your yard. Now if they could just feed on the bug's and recharge their batteries, that would definitely be something. Indefinite, mobile, bug zappers. I like it!
drive stainless
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
Jeez, can't the DoE afford a power source that doesn't come from Wal-Mart?
There has been a lot of work into 'bionic' insects for this purpose. The idea is that you mount a small camera or microphone onto a fly, and also some small electronics that control the flies behaviour. You then have the perfect spy bot.
It seems to me that the next big surveilance technologies will be spawned from this sort of research. Terrorists and drug dealers had better watch out, because with these sorts of tools our police forces will really be able to make an impression, and perhaps really give them a good hiding. Its about time, too.
What else could a small robot with cameras be used for anyway? The major application, in my view, is crime fighting.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
Everything seems to be getting smaller. From micro PCs to super computers to nanobots to appliances etc etc etc.
I love to see any kind of progress in this field of genre. Just imagine the possibilities when doctors are able to send in small probes in our bodies (there was also a movie like that wasn't it?!?). No need to slicing and dicing for surgery.
There is so much potential for this technology. But there is much more work to be done. All in good time though!
peace out.
"Over the next few years, with additional help from other Sandia groups, Heller and Adkins expect to add to the mini-robots either infrared or radio wireless two-way communication capability"
This aspect of robotics interests me the most. Once robots start communicating with each other, researchers will be able to assign one "master" task to a group of robots, then let them figure out the execution (has this been done in labs yet?). Exciting and scary at the same time: where's Neo when you need him?
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
I'd think the logical thing would be to broadcast radio to these things, then convert the signal into power. That'd both control/direct the "swarm", and provide abundant, 24x7 power indoors. The batteries could be recharged from the radio signal, and the device could then make limited movements outside its normal range.
Inefficient, but it'd work. At least till tiny fusion reactors are invented.
Sigh.... Yet another poorly researched /. article. According to the article, these babies don't have cameras or mics yet, just a temperature sensor. The rest is speculation and consideration. You know, it'd be nice if the people that submitted stories read the articles, even if the /. staff doesn't.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
Yes these robots could be quite useful in helping humanity, however we must also consider the harmful effects. If wiretapping regulations are extended to use of micro-robot spycams, what happens to the fourth ammendment on unreasonable searches? At the present I'm not even certain that people who are wiretapped even have to be notified after the fact. Why worry about the mirrors from Orwell's 1984 when we wouldn't even know if there were robot cams present. Sure you could start putting signal jammers all throughout your home, but that'd work to a disadvantage too, since you'd also be prevented from getting broadcast tv, wireless phones, or other currently useful mass technologies like wireless networking. Already people on this forum were talking about using such devices to spy on one another. Not to sound high handed with morals or anything since even I might be tempted to make use of such things, but still we should consider all applications of something before we progress in that direction.
Even smaller, but not auto-mobile.
They have some power, computation and comm-link
on a chip the size of a piece of glitter.
Each might make a single measurement of some type,
but be deployed in thousands or millions.
People have been building some of these.
I know it may seem lazy, but when you have to place thermistors every inch or so, it can get fairly tedious.
Of course I see the applications in the surveyliance and such, and it kinda makes me think 1984 telescreen stuff. Spooky. The best part in that book is when they thought there was no surveilance, and they were talking:
"We are the dead" Winston Said.
"We are the dead" Julia Repeated
"You are the dead" The telescreen reported.
Not something I'd like to have to deal with.
So, next time someone shows you their little tiny robot that's not for overclocking, crush it. (=
"I have not slept a wink"
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
I think this bit of research is particularly facinating to anyone interested in archeology or related sciences. I remember a series on PBS about the Egyptian pyramids; For years archeaologists were prevented from exploring their inner structures due to the tiny access shafts into the main chamber. The only in was to squeeze someone into a 3 foot by 3 foot passage (several hundred meters in length) . Improvements in robotics allowed them to roll a macro-version of this type of robot into the chamber with a camera. Now, if they ARE able to efficiently add a camera to this little device, think of the academic and exploratory possibilities. A waterproof bot could travel to the ocean floor to identify under-the surface micro-organisms. Space-bound bots could land on adverse planets to explore inside the cracks in rocks and hardened soil, etc etc. Though maybe not practical for the everyday person, (I don't think you'll ever see something like this walking your dog or bringing you beer)improvements on this kind of robot could lead to astounding scientific discoveries. That should be exciting to all of you research-heads out there.
A robot small enough to climb into the inside of a pipe, not useful? Please.
What I want is one with enough intelligence (or a link back to a computer with enough intelligence) to crawl around in my walls exterminating ants.
--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Great... now, with just a little more development, the FBI can drive their bugs around to get a better angle for picking up voices. And they get video.
They'll need some skilled operators to dodge the vacuum cleaner, though.
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
"Quick, name a French rock star (no, Jean Luc-Ponty does not count). See what I mean?" -- Johnny Halliday -- Serge Gainsbourg -- Daft Punk Just because you may not have heard of them doesn't mean they aren't famous.
time to negotiate rights for
Battlebots! The Home Game!
$$$$$!
OK... we've already beaten to death the dime vs. quarter and the fact that the camera, et al., are planned and not presently implemented. My beef is that I was sorely disappointed when I read the article based on the promise from the /. abstract.
There is a major difference between "one quarter cubic inch" and "one quarter inch cubed".
Put into mathematical terms,
1/4"^3 does *not* equal 1"^3 x 1/4. It's 1/64 cu in. That would have been/will be most impressive.
That would make a good name for it:
SAUREC
... sounds evil.
For purposes of sensing/surveillance, I see a more interesting (and ominous) technology: Smart Dust. The eventual goal is to miniaturize things so much that the 'robot' (if one can call something that has no ability to move itself a robot) is the size of dust motes. You'd release a cloud of this stuff into the air, with the expectation that some of it will end up somewhere interesting to you. They'd network with each other optically, so large amounts of power wouldn't be needed for comms. Shades of a Neal Stephenson novel.
And faster, with IR and RF links. ht ml
http://dmtwww.epfl.ch/isr/asl/projects/alice_pj
Sig? We don't need no stinkin' sig!
They do, however, hold immense promise in further cluttering up my bedroom. Assuming I ordered one gross, I could have 144 little boxes to trip over in the night.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Having seen the vid I'm a bit disappointed.
I think autonomy requires a bit more than the ability to travel in a straight line until manipulated by a pair of tweezers! A BB on a sloped surface can do that.
I'm not saying that what they've accomplished isn't tremendous - just that the title being applied is a bit generous. Small, Self-Propelled, Highly Mobile are all true of this device and very cool.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
What a great platform to collect porn pictures from the nearest bathroom.
Got Code?
I'll tell you this. It reminds me of a story with tiny robots that are maybe half the size of those were they went crazy and decided to crawl in some guys mouth and ruined him from the inside out. witch would be posible if they were smaller.
Now this makes me think of some kinda probing that some sick doctor would use to check and see whats wrong with you if they ever get that camera thing to work on it. Now wouldn't that be kinda weird
"This could be the robot of the future," says Ed Heller, one of the project's researchers. "It may eventually be capable of performing difficult tasks that are done with much larger robots today - such as locating and disabling land mines or detecting chemical and biological weapons."
No way - the airborne sow I'm working on is much more likely to do these jobs better than this thing.
In a relatively short time, these things will be hosting uninvited web-cams and microphones throughout every nook and cranny of our lives. Covers of the Nat'l Enquirer will now show celebrities grunting on the toilet instead of sunbathing nude by the pool.
Oh well. We'll adjust, somehow.
**>>BELCH
Or put it in your colon and let it get those pollups instead of just sitting around and getting colon cancer.
Click here for $50!
I don't know how much energy it takes to run a calculator, but it might be worth looking into mounting that lil' guy with some solar panels, along with a battery.
Not so useful? Sounds to me as though they're not much larger than the "ingesticam" recently thrown before the FDA. Wouldn't it be nice if that little caplet-shaped device could, for instance, snag polyps, or obtain biopsies from suspicious areas? Once the tools get that small, at least in the GI tract, the nightmare of perforation becomes a mere worry of errant, non-penetrating slices.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
I can see these things as being very useful. Like the other post says, searching through packed debris for survivors.... How bout inspecting nuclear piping at power plants for flaws or wear on the inside of pipes? I'm sure the military is watching their development very closely... if I'm fighting an urban war, and had a dozen of these things out ahead of my location scouting for enemies, I'd be VERY happy. My $0.02.
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
What ever happened to Koko?
Ice age cometh...
This reminds me of The Transparent Society article written by David Brin back in 1996. Still a good read today.
-AU
My money's on the bot with the hydraulic thumb tack spike.
www.ridiculopathy.com
I want one! They're adorable, i'd drive it around on my desk and race 'em against other people's!
Course, i'd have to paint them different colors and make little hats for them, too....;)
According to the article, the power source (watch batteries) is holding them back in size reductions now.
How about using the round watch batteries as wheels? Take a disadvantage, and make it into an advantage!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
According to the article on page 10, U.C. Berkley researcher Kristofer Pister received a $1.2 million grant from the DoD to create super-miniature spy devices! Their smallest device so far is the size of a kernel of corn. However, this new "smart dust" concept will change the entire field of espionage.
"m-Business" has not updated their web site with February issue info yet, but here is the LINK to the site when it is updated.
That said, the limitations of power etc may be one thing, but the applications for small autonomous robots like this are many.
Totally aside from the question that there may be excellent reasons to want to do a task with many small agents rather than one large one. How useful is a single ant?
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Jack not name, jack job!
How about a Beowolf cluster with 1000 of these things communicating wirelessly?
Like lasers...
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
There have been several attempts to solve biological problems around the world with biological solutions. They tried to solve the mouse problem in Australia by importing cats and ended up with a cat problem. In my neck of the woods we have a problem with accidentaly introduced Zebra Mussels.
Little robots might help.
If one gave the little buggers crab legs and instructions to crush Zebra mussels they could be turned loose in the great lakes. When their batteries run low they could drop ballast and float to the surface. A bounty could be placed on them so that they would be gathered up for recharging.
Unlike cats, they wouldn't decide that something other than Zebra Mussels were better eatin'
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
and not much of anything useful.
Maybe not to you.....
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Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
They can't be the smallest untethered autonomous robots ever created because I've created at least one that is smaller, and one that might be smaller (about the same size).
:-)
Sure, my smallest robot might be pretty boring and simple compared to these things (and operating with vastly reduced efficiency because I still haven't got around to putting the coaster wheel on...), but it's probably almost half the size - and since it's solar powered, it is genuinely autonomous (I don't think a battery powered robot can be said to be fully autonomous unless it is capable of recharging or replacing its own batteries).
So Nyah to Sandia - your robots might be much better, but mine are still smaller
I guess scientists are becoming the buttboys of the ruling elite.
Why would it need a camera? To watch what everyone is doing all the time. That ticket for that stop sign that you rolled through will be in your mailbox before you even get home. Your corporate employer will fire you when they see that you smoked pot on the weekend. Or that you didn't attend church on Sunday. After all those Faith Based (tm) charities that started under the Bush regime will be the Moral KGB of the future.
So thanks Doug for helping to ensure the enslavement of the human race......
Hey, you think your house is cool?
well, i think the uses for these guys are pretty widespread.. of course, spying, as others have mentioned, but since they're small and cheap to make, they are semi-disposable:
dump a couple thousand on mars.. if one falls in a ditch who cares. use them to collect video and topography data until they run out of batteries.
dump a couple thousand on the battlefield. no tank is going to see a little robot on a rock. military intelligence could benefit.
mount some landmine detectors on them.. a bunch of these little guys could really cover some area quickly.
pretty cool stuff.
wishus
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We're getting that much closer to Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age where we have clouds of microscopic, lighter-than-air robots that serve as defense/attack systems. Pretty soon someone will engineer these bots into "smart bugs" -- eavesdropping devices that move around, making them harder to find.
I know how up in arm the European privacy adovacates get about personal information being harvested from web browsing, I wonder how they will react to robots with spying capability that are smaller than an insect?
I hope they prefer technological solutions, ie. killer anti-spy bot bots, but a part of me fears that some European countries will attempt to legislate them out of existence, a method that works about as well as legislating popular national culture into existence.
Quick, name a French rock star (no, Jean Luc-Ponty does not count). See what I mean?