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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."
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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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 ? :)
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.
"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."
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