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Towards Self-Replicating Rapid Prototypers
Neil Halelamien writes "Researchers at the University of Bath are developing a rapid prototyping machine capable of making copies of itself and other products, reminiscent of the Universal Constructor proposed by von Neumann. The so-called Replicating Rapid-Prototyper (or RepRap) would produce items from raw materials and small components like microchips. If successful, this could make rapid prototyping cheap enough for regular in-home usage, especially since the project's lead, Dr. Adrian Bowyer, will be releasing his project's designs under the GNU GPL. It's previously been proposed that a similar system would be useful for space exploration and industrialization."
Oh darn... the editors cut out my link to the Wikipedia article on von Neumann's Universal Constructor (i.e. clanking replicator). Here it is:
...
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Constructor
From the article:
A clanking replicator is an artificial self-replicating system that relies on conventional large-scale technology and automation. The term evolved to distinguish such systems from the microscopic "assemblers" that nanotechnology may make possible.
Such a machine violates no physical laws, and we already possess the basic technologies necessary for some of the more detailed proposed designs.
A self-replicating machine would need to have the capacity to gather energy and raw materials, process the raw materials into finished components, and then assemble them into a copy of itself. It is unlikely that this would all be contained within a single monolithic structure, but would rather be a group of cooperating machines or an automated factory that is capable of manufacturing all of the machines that make it up. The factory could produce mining robots to collect raw materials, construction robots to put new machines together, and repair robots to maintain itself against wear and tear, all without human intervention or direction. The advantage of such a system lies in its ability to expand its own capacity rapidly and without additional human effort; in essence, the initial investment required to construct the first clanking replicator would have an arbitrarily large payoff with no additional cost.
On a completely different note, does anyone else remember the Slylandro probes from Star Control 2?
I'm not sure what the big deal is about this particular rapid prototyping machine at Bath. Hod Lipson's lab at Cornell, for instance, has been able to create a solid freeform fabrication system which can print plastic, metal, circuits, actuators, and even batteries! They are, in my opinion, much further along than the referenced article. Other related projects of include Chrikjian's work at Johns Hopkins, and Jordan Pollack's DEMO Lab at Brandeis University.
I worked for five years for a company that made rapid prototyping milling machines for circuit boards.
The circuit board rapid prototyping machine was basically an X-Y plotter with a Dremell tool motor that moved up and down. It cut lines on the surface of a copper-coated fiberglass board.
The cheapest machine to do this still cost about $10,000. Plus you had to have the PCB all ready laid out and ready for manufacture. It was slow, loud, and difficult to calibrate. I did a rewrite of the manual in English in order to clarify lots of little details needed for efficient operation. My rewrite came to 40 pages. And this is just to make a simple circuit like an op-amp buffer.
The machine 'ate' milling tools like gumdrops, at about $17 each. One tiny mistake, and your board was toast. Our fearless leader couldn't grasp that our primary competition wasn't the other circuit board milling machine maker, it was SPICE and the offshore inexpensive board houses where you could e-mail your Gerber files and get back finished professional PCBs by FedEx letter within a few days at much less cost than the materials alone would cost for the milling machine.
A great idea and product turned into a dead-end job, a white-elephant product, and a brick wall of cement-head management.
The point is, any 'rapid prototyping' machine will have a long way to go before it does anything relevant and productive. It will be many decades before any machine attempting to claim to be a 'general-purpose' rapid-prototyping machine will be anything more than a very expensive laboratory curiosity; the subject of speculative psuedo-scientific articles just this side of the science-fiction line.
Yeah I read about this in The Science of Discworld which is a really great read overall. I remembered enough for google to provide the rest. Here is a link to the homepage of the guy who ran the experimenta nth/ade.html
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/adri
Cheers.