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.

Comments

Cooperation

[alienmole]

Try thinking cooperatively as well as competitively. Your airborne device could drop and interact with a small army of ground-based devices. The ability of any single device to understand its environment is limited by its point of view. By interacting with devices in other locations, your device and its controllers can become more knowledgeable, and more intelligent. You probably already interact with orbiting satellites (GPS) - why not with some little guys on the ground?

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.

A hive mind?

[leperjuice]

I'm surprised, given the predilection for Beowulf-cluster-posts, that no one has mentioned the possible weirdness that might evolve if the robots were able to act as a single parallel processing cluster.

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....

Careful of those little buggers

[Cubic_Spline]

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....

cool

[omega_rob]

I'd use an army of those bad boys to conduct covert ops from my cube. Spying on board meetings at the office, gathering incriminating evidence on my enemies, that sort of thing. I bet if you had enough of them you could use them for more insidious purposes, like political assassinations and infiltrating the dread pirate Napster headquarters. That'd be cool. Wrong, somehow, but cool.

omega_rob

Anyone read the articles?

[AntiPasto]

I mean... the camera, and the other cool things you listed are *planned*... it just has a temperature sensor and treads.

Ahem. Do you read?!? Can you?

Garfield the cat says that people who can read, should!

----

Actually, I am sure the CIA have better ones.

[Lover's Arrival, The]

Projects such as these are well funded by the intelligence services. It would be their dream come true to create a small robot that was capable of circulating around air conditioning vents and landing on the ceiling in order to spy.

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.

Re:Actually, I am sure the CIA have better ones.

[CaseyB]

The major application, in my view, is crime fighting.

<squeaky voice>"Put down your weapon. You have twenty seconds to comply."</squeaky voice>

radio?

[scotpurl]

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.

screw all that...

[Gehenna_Gehenna]

time to negotiate rights for
Battlebots! The Home Game!
$$$$$!

Smallest Autonomous Untethered Robot Ever Created

[Tom7]

That would make a good name for it:

SAUREC

... sounds evil.

Re:but could they...

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

can they moderate on /.

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... :-) )

---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"

New "Nanobot" category on Battlebots!

[tenzig_112]

You'll need special electromagetic microscope cameras to see them fight, but it'll be awesome.

My money's on the bot with the hydraulic thumb tack spike.

www.ridiculopathy.com

useful

[wishus]

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
---