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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.
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.
...think "flea circus"
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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.
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
The real question is can they configure a web server correctly and negate the slashdot effect.
:(
So far, it appears not.
BilldaCat
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.
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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.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?
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!"
'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
Pure research useless? Boy, what planet you from?
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!
/.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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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
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.
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.
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.
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"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.
time to negotiate rights for
Battlebots! The Home Game!
$$$$$!
That would make a good name for it:
SAUREC
... sounds evil.
You are probably thinking of "Fantastic Voyage" and it was from the 60's (I think it was a book by Isaac Asimov). The effects were pretty good for the time, but lame by today's standards.
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.
I think if you read the article the answer is obviously "no". They run on batteries, not crack!
(Says the guy that just used up 5 moderator points... :-) )
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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.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"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!
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!
My money's on the bot with the hydraulic thumb tack spike.
www.ridiculopathy.com
and not much of anything useful.
Maybe not to you.....
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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
The 'speculation' is well beyond the "gee, maybe someday" stage. It's only a matter of time, and a very short time at that.
**>>BELCH
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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