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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."
The RIAA has finally met their match...
Black holes mentioned earlier, now self-replicating robots. We're screwed.
Is anybody else thinking of the replicators from Stargate SG-1? But assuming we find the weapon of the ancients in time, then yes, this sounds awesome.
Such a machine would have a number of interesting characteristics, such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, I have always been interested in applying evolution to computer chips - the randomness and efficiency of evolution is going to find better ways of doing things than our current methods, and is also just damn cool to know your computer chip is analogous to a living 'species'.
This will be GPL'd. I don't know how the copyright cartels would react if a machine could make illegal copies of itself.
What?
If the good doctor were to suddenly die in the next four years, I'd start lining my baseball caps.
I'd welcome somebody with an original joke.
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?
Unless it can make me tea, I can't say I'm interested... then again... think about the new abilities to piss the RIAA/MPAA/USGOV off with this? It would make downloading music seem like childs play next to making an all plastic car **cough** **cough** saturn **cough** **cough** that I downloaded the blue prints from alt.binaries.replicator.cars.
Really though, I find the adoption timeline to bit a little bit optomistic... 5 to 10 years for it to become common place in homes? It's taken 5 to 10 years for the internet to catch on, and that doesn't require bulky equipment. Perhaps in the next 50 years before I'm gone, but not in 5 to 10.
My 2cents...
But man, I'd live a childhood fantsay to order my tea from a replicator.
'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it...
The only thing that worries me about self replicating machines is the "grey goo" problem. This is pretty much only an issue with nanotech replicators, I don't see it happening with this approach. For those not familiar with the term, the grey goo issue is when self replicating machines go out of control and turn everything into copies of themselves, rather than the target material. Altho the approach described in the article won't work with all metal alloys or glass, it's very likely that this type of machine could make molds. Making a negative of a 3d model isn't that much harder than making a positive. Anyone who's ever done any sand casting of metal will get the idea. Although the seed cost of 25k (pounds? what is that, about 40k usd?) might sound prohibitive to get the ball rolling, keep in mind that the cost of rapid prototyping machines has hit that price point only a short time after they cost millions. One of the great benefits of fabs like this would be a shift from mass production to single person production. Once everyone has a fab on their desktop, and a supply of low cost feedstock, the economy of scale that makes mass production a good idea no longer comes into play. If you want a set of plastic bowels, plastic toys, or whatever, they don't have to be the same as the rest of the production run, they can be made special just for you. If this is the case, perhaps the design behind the objects will become valuable. Anyone with a pc and the right software could become and industrial designer. I'm still eagerly awaiting the arrival of nanoassemblers, which I think will be bigger than fire, but this is an exciting development that could change a lot of things.
A rapid prototyping machine that can reproduce itself is a kind of holy grail. When we get that, we have something that can bootstrap itself. This would be the Santa Claus machine that we have long dreamed of. One of the major proponents of this has been Don Lancaster. His site is the link below.
www.tinaja.com/santa01.html
Once everyone has a machine in their basement, the economy of the world will be turned on its ear. Consumer goods will cost only the price of their materials. The cheap labor advantage of India and China will vanish. The nature of products will change. Right now, it makes no sense to make something repairable. It is cheaper to build something that can't be fixed and throw it away. When we get very distributed manufacturing however, things will be built with only one or two raw materials. Things will be built so they are easy to assemble. It would make sense to build a new heating element for your coffee pot. Waste would go down. Recycling would become much more immediate and local. People would share designs the way we now share open source software. Quite a different world would result.
" being able to build anything we want ourselves."
Seen Forbidden Planet? Bad idea.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
Apparently there already is a self-replicating system out there; the system is capable of manufacturing virtually any kind of tool, machine or technology known. To make new copies of itself, it uses only common materials from the environment- water, oxygen, vegetable matter, protein, and that kind of thing. Unfortunately, top computer scientists and engineers are having trouble figuring out the self-replication process. Apparently, it involves some mysterious mechanism known as "sex", which takes place with a "woman". Anyone else know any more about this?
Except even with this you wouldn't be able to legally make anything you wanted, because copyrights and patents still exist. It's sort of like getting a CD burner and saying, "Now I can burn anything I want."
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
And the Wright Flyer was only a distant cousin to the Space Shuttle...
- Structure: The core parts of the device need a strong, stable material that can hold everything together.
- Motion: The device needs materials that convert energy into mechanical motion. These materials might include electromagnetics, electrostatics, piezoelectrics, shape-memory alloys, chemo-dynamic protein muscles, thermodynamic cycle systems, etc. Each of these types of motion-creating materials has special needs/chemicals that might require special handling devices that, in turn, must be made out of the materials in the self-replicating device. Motion is often tricky because it requires specialized assemblies of materials (think of the complexity of a simple DC electric motor or the gears and linkages in a robotic arm).
- Control: The device needs some form of logic that can read some analog of a blue-print, ROM, DNA, etc. and direct the fabrication process. If based on standard electronics, this would include materials that act as insulators, conductors, and semiconductors.
- Power: This may be the trickiest because creating sufficient power requires purified, highly engineered materials. Self-replicating a modern alkaline battery would be quite a feat. Perhaps the semiconductor technology of the control materials could be leveraged for solar panels.
I suspect that one of the trickiest part of all this is in handling and converting bulk materials (usually a liquid, powder, or solid ingot) into a shaped and controlled component or assembly. The replicator must interface with raw materials supplies, move bulk materials to a fabrication point, and convert the bulk material into a usable component in its offspring. Space exploring self-replicators face an even greater challenge of processing raw space materials (moon rock, asteroidal metals, etc.) into refined feed-stocks for replication.Its a tricky problem, but one that we will eventually solve.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
...this is how tribbles got started.
While the idea of a 3D printer cheap enough for personal use /is/ going to revolutionize the world by making certain real items as cheap as software, the part about it being a von Neumann machine is overrated. The article just mentions it in passing and there is no evidence that he's actually figured out how to do that. That's been one of the holy grails of engineering since it was proposed. The article doesn't mention whether the materials used will be recyclable. Since everyone and their grandmother will start spitting out objects if they have this and since it would probably be cheaper to build a new object rather than repairing an old one, mass use of UCs will produce tons of waste. Imagine if you could never delete any file on your computer but could create more easily. You would run out of space very quickly.
BTW, for a good book on the social implications of cheap universal constructors, I suggest the Stephenson's book Diamond Age.
--
Want a free iPod?
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof
Louis Riel walks into a taxidermist and gets arrested. There was a mounted police officer inside.
http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/doc/vinge
and then chose the html document.
Man- when I was a kid- it was so hard to get porn. There was one magazine that was handed down year after year. Soon- kids will be able to download and manufacture their own sex toys. Man- I grew up in the wrong era.
All this was done in a very crude way, as if they were developing a process for home use. Their metal casting technique is scary. They used "Wood's Metal", which is a solder-like alloy of tin, lead, cadmium, and bismuth. All of which are toxic. Lead and cadmium cause heavy-metal poisoning, and the body won't clear either of them. No serious precautions seem to have been taken against inhalation - they just used gloves. At one point they tried powdered metal, which is much more of an inhalation hazard than molten liquid. They need to run their people through the usual checks for heavy-metal poisoning.
There are rapid prototyping machines that deposit metal, and that's probably a more useful direction.
All this is a long, long way from self-replication.
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.
1. You buy an appliance that can manufacture a hell of a lot of stuff you use on a daily basis.
Plus it can manufacture itself, so if you really want to, you can make a couple more. Personally, I think it'll take a while before a commercial entity will offer a product that will compete with it. It makes no financial sense. They'd sooner make an appliance that can manufacture anything *but* itself. But let's skip to the point where someone built a self-replicating machine, and much like gmail accounts, sooner than not everybody's got one for himself and 6 or 50 to give out to his friends.
2. You stop buying a major percentage of the stuff you use on a daily basis.
3. Some companies, from many sectors, who make stuff that you've been using go out of business. Not a bad thing in itself. Many whip-makers went out of business when cars were invented and horses stopped being the preferred means of travel. It's the natural course of technology.
4. People make more and more stuff that they need out of raw materials.
5. Raw materials become more scarce. No more plastics in the bin. Plastic Recycling plants get no more plastic cuz nobody's throwing it away anymore. The price on anything made from materials useable at home rises dramatically.
6. Things we cannot manufacture at home yet which we still buy and are made of said materials, say your car, go up in price due to higher material costs.
So you pay less for your plates and but more for your car.
7. New content market: Designs. Expect the DIAA (you heard it here first).
We'll be pirating our dishwasher plans from P2P, paying for raw materials, making it at home. Designers will be watermarking (plasticmarking) their designs. Ripping groups will be removing the marks. Machines whose designs we steal and which we built will call home over the net to activate unless we download a hacked version.
This time around, it won't be just the music industry clinging to their antiquated business model. Suddenly every company that sold you a plate, cup, PDA case or pen will want to sell you PENS (where you pay per item) rather than a design of a pen (where you pay once to get the design). First they'll laugh at you, then they'll fight you (and this time around will probbably have a humongous lobby compared to what the RIAA has today), and then you'll win of course, those of the companies that managed to strip off the bulk of the no longer neccesary manufacturing from the price of what you buy making it to the next round.
Change indeed.
Like software or music, all over again.
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Already exists, it's called life. Took us ... a few million years but we finally got around to getting to what life has had since well... 3 point something billion year ago.
Actually what you really want to do is to build a set of evolving self-assembling robots that get their parts by disassembling other robots. That way there is evolutionary pressure to evolve faster and faster self-assemblers.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Not even that. Almost all rapid prototyping machines can only print in one material at a time, usually some form of plastic. The resolution and material properties are not good enough to build any complicated mechanical parts such as the XYZ tables used in the dimension printer -- visible in one of the pictures in the artice.
You might be able to create a poorly functioning rapid prototyping (RP) printer by using several different RP technologies, the question is why you'd want to. The build time is usually counted in days for any larger part, say 12*12*12 inches. It would take months to build a refridgerator sized machine. Then you'd still have to assemble it manually anyway.
Standard manufacturing technologies would be much cheaper and faster. They're usually loaded with a cartridge, powder or fluid of material depending on the technology. You'll have to reload the material manually between builds. The material is usually quite expensive compared to say ABS plastic used for injection molding. As one of the salesmen we talked to told us: "We make the money on the material not the printer". This guy was from dimension printers, their machines incidentally prints ABS plastic parts.
The software side takes any 3d model in STL format and prints it, no or little manual work is required.
Dont's use word!
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.
First generation self-replicating machines will simply consider electronic components (or DC motors) "natural ressources".
You as the user will buy 1 pack of plastic, one pack of metal and one pack of varied electronic components (expect many flavors to this kind of pack).
Those pack will be extremely useful for other gpl-hardware writers (don't forget that anything that uses the code of the original machine is GPLed too!).
As the system gets more evolved you might have to buy 7 different metals and then make your own electronic components on the spot, but it's not necessary at the begining.
How interesting.
New archeological evidence seems to confirm the idea that our race was actually created by some ancient living things called "humans".
Don't try to use the force. Do or do not, there is no try.
Slashcode has been behaving interestingly for a few years now.
Using only Plain Old Text you can insert any of the allowed
HTML tags.
me
- to show
you.If you will.
Note
how
these last two spaces happened without any formatting tags.
This kind of renders HTML format obsolete, code format redundant, and extrans just a variant of code. And all of those options are functionally available under the increasingly misnamed "Plain Old Text." Of course this was a big improvement over the old method, and is an improvement that should stay. But the option menu should go, as many people get stuck in HTML mode and don't know how to get out, and other don't realize that you can use the allowed HTML tags in plain old text mode.Showing that this is, indeed, Plain Old Text mode.
The ______ Agenda
YES, but do they have to use *.doc format?
"My God! It's full of stars!"
Everyone quotes Terminator and Stargate, but the classic cinematic portrayal of a von Neumann machine was the Monolith as seen in "2010: The Year We Made Contact".
The Monolith turned out to be a self-replicating multipurpose tool, and was described by Dr. Floyd as a von Neumann machine.
He's Jesus, for Christ's sake.
What I just said was a slashdot Meme. I too would appreciate a new joke - but they just don't catch on at all. I tried "Soviet Korea" but nobody else uses it. Ah well. A comic's work is never ending.
I recall reading in my middle-school years (aka junior high) a rather unique story about replicating robots. The story was written in the 1960s-1970s
Essentially, the premise is that a meteor falls out of the sky one night, where it is observed by a few people. When they arive at the site, it is bustling with miniature robots. They call the government, and the gov shows up to observe, but by then the robots have built little buildings. Some robots are strip-mining, and they eventually build a little refinery, then more robots, then a bigger refinery... and a launch pad. By the end of the story (and by the time anyone realized they were in danger), the robots had built themselves little rockets, and were now shooting their seeds of new robot colonies around the country, soon to dominate the world, totally dispassionate for whatever was there to begin with... it just wasn't in their programming.
To boil the story down, some long forgotten alien race had created the ultimate automated factory, traveling from star system to star system to collect rare materials, and ship it back for the long ride home at sub-light speeds. Its a self propagating system, that as they spread from system to system, asteroid to moon to planet, the geometric growth would provide their civilization every material they would ever need...
But over the past few years we've seen a growing number of university teams approaching cheap personal prototyping from different angles. Each quietly adding to the pool of ideas from which the next efforts will draw.
Wired Magazine, in November 2004 covered Neil Gershenfeld's work at MIT. Slashdot discussion here
Gershenfeld's can produce solid objects like eyeglass frames, action figures and electronic devices like radios and computers.
Another approach to rapid prototyping and manufacturing uses inkjet technology. Inkjet Printers spitting out polymer instead of ink, manufacturing solar cells, batteries, complete working gadgets, human tissue and computer circuitry. (Disclosure: The above link is one of my BlogSpot articles on the acceleration).
Researchers Hod Lipson and Jordan B. Pollack at Brandeis University have coupled inkjet technology and software to autonomously design and fabricate robots without human intervention.
or
Google Search
The software simulates a variety of rudimentary virtual robots. In an accelerated Darwinian contest of survival over hundreds of generations, the most successful robotic designs are then physically prototyped. Robots autonomously designing, testing and manufacturing robots.
We're very close.
Ted
Thoughts on the Emergence of Computing Intelligence