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Self-Repairing Spacecraft Uses Ant Logic
Elitist_Phoenix wrote to mention a New Scientist story about what could be the first steps towards a self-repairing spacecraft. From the article: "The team at CSIRO, Australia's national research organisation, is working with NASA on the project and has so far created a model skin made up of 192 separate cells. Behind each cell is an impact sensor and a processor equipped with algorithms that allow it to communicate only with its immediate neighbours. Just as ants secrete pheromones to help guide other ants to food, the CSIRO algorithms leave digital messages in cells around the system, indicating for instance the position of the boundary around a damaged region. The cell's processor can use this information to route data around the affected area."
that when this thing gets built that it won't do ANY of what it was originally intended to do but will wind up costing about twenty times more than originally budgeted?
Is it fascism yet?
Something you'd see on late night TV where they implant a spaceship with proprietary "ant-logic". The spaceship becomes sentient and runs straight into a planet in a vain attempt to lift it.
It is nice that these skin cells can detect that they have been damaged, yet I read nothing about if they have been damaged, how they plan to repair the damages caused?
I guess this is just a way for processing of a system to continue, even if a certain chunk of the spacecraft is destroyed, that it can still function seperate from the rest...
Few Question though about this layout:
1. How is the power system? Is this a central powered source, such as from a battery pack with a solar panel to recharge it, or is each cell having it's own power cell and solar panel to recharge things?
2. What is going to be implemented, as far as damage recovery systems? Is there going to be another group of devices onboard, that can be dispatched to repair cells? Is there going to be a collection of extra cells waiting, so that the damaged cells can be discarded, and the new cells brought into place?
3. Communications among cells are discussed, yet what about relaying this information back to NASA? Also, what happens if the primary communications antenna is destroyed... is there provisions to replace this as well, using this technology?
It looks like this is a start to promising self-healing taking place in satellites and other devices, not to mention the implementations of it being used on Earth...
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Kent Brockman: "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords".
You know...the one about Homer in space and the ant experiment they sent up got broken and there are ants floating around....guess you had to have seen it.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
I thought they had dropped anti-logic...
substitute 'adjacency updates' for 'pheromones' and you have a generic dynamic routing protocol...
Everything sounds just fine until the damned things carry off your picnic lunch.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Finally we can have a system that tells us stuff like:
Rerouting through secondary coupling.
Bypassing damaged pathways.
Red alert! Red alert!
Diverting power around fused regulator 4A-CJ1.
The colony is under attack! Protect the Queen!
Which one's the Queen? I'm the Queen! No you're not!
Freedom, horrible horrible freedom!
The ants and space stuff kinda threw me off, but either way it's about time if you ask me.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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...v'ger mode demanding all the Earth's sugar.
I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why they would need to use 'ant logic' or whatever for this system. All it does is take readings and process them in each cell... why not just use a central database of all the cells and a central (yet redundant) computer to process all the data.
Seems like you'd get the same result, but it wouldn't be as 'cool' or expensive to develop...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"Human scientists discover the secret of Automated Repair"
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
maybe now those poor robots can avoid spinning out into the void after falling through the meteor hole where the ship's backup brain was stored, and the strateej-o-mat will never revert to lurk mode.
Cue the "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that" jokes...
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Erm, I don't get the reason behind the "Self-Repairing" part. As far as I can see, it's Diagnostic they have in mind. As long as they're one piece, solid state cells they ain't going to repair anything. But sure, they can tell you stuff, like any sensor array out there. Imho, we shouldn't consider this anything more than it is: smart skin. Sure we have ceramic/metalic/whatever thingies protecting the space ships now. But if instead of that we could have smart ceramic/metalic/whatever skin that can tell us what exactly is wrong with it (burn, corrosion, impact, radiation levels?), I still think it's a great thing, which doesn't need the bombastic allusion to self contained tech. The only way I see self contained tech occuring is nanotech, and that's just because the "bricks" of it are too small for our perception. In fact, our whole tech is self contained, but we don't really accept it because we see the "parts" being so different and apart. Being small enough will create the illusion of it, but hey, who said we're smarter than that ? :)
I think its more of a 'start' of something..
You cant repair something if you dont know its broke...
So, this would be the logical first step.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Didn't Microsoft already patent this concept?
prior art?
http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/watchmakers/
there is a book by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournell called "The Mote in God's Eye" and the moties are some interesting charactors...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
..why do self-repairing ants need new spacecraft?!
Zonkbonking is wrong :(
"Up and At'em, ATOM ANT!"
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Don't you think? Exactly what our skin does, or rather, the nervous system endings in our skin. If you get cut, all the nerves around the cut go off and send signals, like pain. So, the same can work for a spacecraft, sending off messages about the problem. Now if scientists can just get these processors to perform mitosis so that ships can "heal" themselves, we'll be all set!
And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be bannana-shaped.
Just don't call them Replicators.
In Soviet Russia, Nigel makes plans for you!
They are telepathic and can spot a picnic basket from orbit. On the upside they go great covered in Chocolate. But the size factor would make the many gallons of Chocolate very expensive to ship from earthside.
Guess it's time to get cracking on those orbital farms.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
"Click, click, hum.
Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
Hmmm.
A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it got was a hum.
The higher level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and the low level supervising program said that it couldn't remember exactly, but thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting.
The higher level supervising program considered this and didn't like it. It asked the low level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low level supervising program said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was something that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn't find it, which was why it had alerted the higher level supervising program to the problem .
The higher level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up tables to find out what the low level supervising program was meant to be supervising.
It couldn't find the look-up table .
Odd.
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor.
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising agent which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing.
Small modules of software -- agents -- surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly established that the ship's memory, all the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged.
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the ship's logic chamber for installation.
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong."
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
If ants can be trained to sort small screws in space...
"Honey, there's a Mars Probe carrying away our potato salad! I told you we shouldn't have picnicked near JPL."
Seriously, though:
"Other groups are developing impact sensor systems controlled by a centralised processor. But such systems would fail if the area containing the processor were damaged. So a distributed system could be much more reliable, says Bill Prosser of NASA's Nondestructive Evaluation Sciences Branch in Langley, Virginia."
That kind of seems like overkill. It's like "One processor is too risky, so we should instead have 100." Have 3 processors and 3 busses. If something can damage all 3, then the probe is F'd beyond all repair anyhow. You have to wire power to 100 processors anyhow if you do that such that a damaged power bus can still take out multiple panels. Weight is premium on probes, and 99 processors is not a very effective use of weight.
Table-ized A.I.
ant clean, repair
to fix their spacecraft. Ah well. This is cooler.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
I prefer make.
This is how the Borg got started. Watch out, NASA.
Table-ized A.I.
Would that ant be trying to lift a rubber tree planet? He's got high hopes!
This sounds like something out of his novel Prey. In the book, virtual "agents" are developed and coded within a computer system, and one of the AI behaviors is modeled on ants. Of course, with technology developed like this, and implemented into other types of machines, such as nano particles, new species could be created, and problems could arise.
NASA scientists charged for developing extensive peer-to-peer filesharing system disguised as "self repairing ant logic"
garble
The first alien that comes along with a giant magnifying glass and we're screwed.
Saw an article some months ago in Popular Science about cars may eventually be made of this stuff so that when they get in a fender bender the "dent" in the car pops back out saving insurance companies millions of dollars currently going towards minor repairs. Also found an old article from 2001 here and here on the same subject.
"Centralized" dosn't mean single, thats why I said "redundant" centralized systems, rather then a weird, unessisary CA system.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"OW! Hot! Hot! Hot! Hot!"
Blank until
In one of the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy *books* the book opens with a spacecraft being disabled but not detecting it because the part of the ship responsible for detecting whether it had been hit by a meteor was knocked out by a meteor.
They should be using cockroach logic so the space probe will survive forever. You know... like Voyager 6 (V'ger). ;)
they need to hire some new blood. these 60 year old donkeys they got with these 60 year old ideas just got to go. why the christ wouldn't you make the sensors able to communicate with EVERY other node? they do realize that if a large ring shaped problem occurred in the net that the inner nodes could never communicate with the outer nodes. there is no reason to do things this way and it doesn't make the problem any more fail safe, it just makes the solution to any problem based on this data that much more prone to special cases. dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb.
UP AND AT THEM.
The first launch application will be on the Nomad probe, targeted to collect sammples, sterilize and return to Earth for analysis.
This is deceiving. From the title I thought they had java software recompiled in space :-)
People should add either TM (Trademark) or RL (Real Life) when they use confusing terminology. This way nobody would be confused reading headlines like Self-Repairing Spacecraft Uses Ant (RL) Logic or Bug Found In Ant (TM)
Actually this is a bad idea. Since Microsoft has copyrights on the whole english dictionnary it would be difficult to use english anymore: Windows, Office, Word, Excel, Access, Exchange, Notepad (etc).
Maybe I am just too tired and I need a cup of java (RL).
lucm, indeed.
Steps of dynamic routing:
1. discover an efficient route
2. detect loss of connectivity
3. goto 1
This is only step 2 and only for a finite, non-expanding, known set of nodes whose relative topological positions are pre-arranged for convenience. Ie in terms of relative complexity this is to Tic-tac-toe as dynamic routing is Go.
REDO FROM START
When can I use this on my car?? LOL!!!!
In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women!
You can't handle the truth.
If you don't believe me, watch any debate between scientists and creationists.
Even when no logic is present, sparks can fly if anti-logic is present in sufficiently large quantities, say, during debates between candidates for the U.S. Presidency.
Small amounts of anti-logic can be handled safely by ignoring it (e.g., most guests on the Okra Windbag show (esp. Tom Cruise)).
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
You could think of it as the software being self-repairing by routing around the damaged hardware.
To use a human analogy, a person who has a stroke can recover to some extent, even though individual neurons may be permanently damaged or killed.
The system as a whole (human/spacecraft) is self-repairing, even though individual components (neurons/cells) may noy be.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Believe me ants are awesome ;-). Though this may cost a fortune now, and I don't see it being near what it will be in the end, the possibilites with something of this nature are endles, from putting them on cars during crash tests, to better see how and what breaks first, to shapechanging objects.
ModLife.Net - If it ain't modded, what's the point?
Are the sensors all Cell processors? That would rock! Just think, a synergistic CPU in a grid of hundreds or thousands... the space-based supercomputer. And no need for extra cooling if the skin is facing away from the sun!
antipaucity
Iron Mans' armor was made of something called flex-metal. It was a series of interconnecting tiles that acted independantly of each other, but communicated information on its condition and position. Sounds like NASA has cought up to the comics.