Slashdot Mirror
Microrobot Developed at Dartmouth
TheSync writes "Dartmouth researchers have developed the world's smallest untethered, controllable microrobot. The microrobot is much smaller and less massive than previous controllable microrobots. It measures only 60 by 250 micrometers. It receives power and control signals from the grid of electrodes it walks on, and moves by bending its body like a caterpillar. Not quite nanomachines, but we are getting closer!"
The microrobot is much smaller as less massive than previous controllable microrobots.
Do you even glance at these before hitting "publish"?
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
about as wide as a strand of human hair, and half the length of the period at the end of this sentence. About 200 of these could march in a line across the top of a plain M&M.
I wish I had the wit to ridicule this properly. Note the care taken to distinguish between plain or peanut M&Ms...
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
cute little fella, isn't it?
Hooray! Now we can have the world's tiniest caterpillar race!
Do the 'editors' ever actually read these submissions anymore?
Dartmouth researchers have developed the world's smallest untethered, controllable microrobot
Let me know when they develop uncontrollable microrobots.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
This sort of a device sounds useful for performing certain surgeries, namely tubal ligation in females. Or perhaps even as an intrauterine contraceptive. Imagine one of these devices scooting around, looking for eggs to envelop and destroy. It may very well be far safer than using drugs.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Good to see that CMU isn't the only group that's trying to break into Tech.edu
It's a waldo. A robot is independent; a robot makes its own decisions, whether based on the environment or anything the programmers dreamed up. This device is "teleoperated", as the builders say. The word for such a thing is waldo, not robot.
Inventors are responsible for naming their inventions properly. If you call them "microrobots", artless Slashdot editors will publish stories calling them "micorobots". No one wants to write "microrobots", however accurate might be that term in Grecoczech, or even in Greczech.
--
make install -not war
use M&M's.
Where's waldo?
... therefore it is not "untethered".
How many microrobots can I control on such a grid ? You definitely don't want to have individual wire to each electrode. So it would be some kind of array similar to in semiconductor memories. I wonder what kind of addressing scheme would be required to make sure that we can control a whole army on the grid. I hope the forthcoming paper will have some discussion about it.
It's not really untethered if it has to always be in contact with the grid that supplies the power and communication link. It's about as "untethered" as the electric bumpercars at the fair.
Their extremely tiny machine is about as wide as a strand of human hair, and half the length of the period at the end of this sentence. About 200 of these could march in a line across the top of a plain M&M. [...] Their paper describes a machine that measures 60 micrometers by 250 micrometers
Look at all the different units! WoaHHs, PatEoTSs, even um! Engineering like this is why NASA runs into problems whenever they try to do a joint operation with the ESA.
can mount a frikkin' laser on its head.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Whatever you do, don't try to overclock these babies, not even with watercooling.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
it's not "untethered". it's sitting ON a control and power grid. so they turned the tether into a grid? i really don't see how that's neat. that's just a name change. i mean the robot's cool, but it's hardly untethered. it can't exactly run loose in the lab, or the street, or ...
anything. It's it great the way we always hear about groundbreaking achievements that "could" be used in future applications, but we never actually hear about the applications? Just once I'd like to see a press release where the scientists say "and it can do this useful function right now which we intend to start a spinoff company to commercialise."
How we know is more important than what we know.
"At very small scales, this machine is surprisingly fast."
I just thought that was pretty funny. I mean, at pretty small scales a sloth is a speeding bullet. But his point obviously is that it has a large speed to size ratio.
And did anyone else notice that during the video linked in the article as he says, "These robots are maybe 10x the size of human blood cells", while the video shows red blood cells on the machine. It's clear from the image that what he is saying is clearly not true. Maybe just bad editing.
"Smaller and less massive"? Are they also more effective and less ineffective than previous designs?
A picture in the gallery shows one of these things covered in "human red blood cells." Clearly, they're already running amok!
I have to go buy some duct tape...
Bill McLellan, the guy who won Feynman's motor challenge would have won sooner but he kept losing his motor in the dust on his workbench.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
How the hell is this thing supposed to fetch me a beer?
And what's the wear-lifetime of a such a small device? And how does a "microrobot" mean that we're "one step closer to a nanorobot"? The article makes no such claim, and such an extraordinary decrease in size--at least factor a billion in terms of volume--is so dramatic it boggles the mind that it was even suggested. Let me give a good idea about the feasibility of "nanorobots": nature has been shrinking critters for /billions/ of years, look to their level of functionality, i.e. what does a bacterium do? what does a virus do? what does a prion do? to get an idea of what "nanorobots" would be capable of.
OK - They are 60 x 250 micrometers or .000060 x .000250 meters, so you get 66,666,666.66 of them per m^2. If you include the entire playing field (w/ end zones) an NFL football field is 360 ft. x 160 ft. or 57,600 ft^2 or ~5,351.215 m^2. So there are (if I haven't messed anything up!) ~356,747,673,600 (I carried the calculations at full precision and rounded the result, so your results might not be exactly the same as mine). I leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate the number required for other sizes of fields.
The work was funded in part by the Department of Homeland Security Well, you know they'll somehow go to good use in the war on terra.
An olympic swimming pool has a volume of at least 2500 m^3 (from the rules & regulations found here: http://www.fina.org/rules/FR/rules_fr3.htm)
So...
Assuming it's 3um tall (a guess based on the picture)
Also assuming that it's a rectangle (it's not - someone can feel free to take this calculation a bit futher)
The volume of the robot is therefore 4.5x10^-14 m^3
So we get ~55,555,555,555,555,556 robots to fill an olympic size swimming pool.
Google agrees with you!
By the way, for some reason I was always feeling bad wasting Google's bandwidth to perform my silly unit conversions (note: not my company's bandwidth, since it allowed to me to be reasonably confident in my result so much faster!
Does anyone know of an Open Source calculator which would do something like this? Well, in
$$ realm I can think of Mathematica and (maybe)
an AMS-VHDL implementation converting units
properly, but still... I wish Google would just
open-source this code (no, there are no ads on
calculator results).
Totally off-topic, I know...
Paul B.
What the heck with not allowing normal HTML A-tag here??? ;-)l ient=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial& q=360+feet+*160+feet+%2F+(60+micrometers+*+250+mic rometers)&btnG=Search
-----------------
Anyway, Google agrees with you!
http://www.google.ca/search?num=20&hs=wF4&hl=en&c
Don't forget that the key ingredient of microdots was developed at Berkley, and since they were derived from a fungus, they could have been considered mycodots as well...
The fact that there are so many typos (as ridiculed above) or the fact that Suicidegirls posted this news topic hours before /. did.
(or the fact that I know SG posted this before /.)
They brought Microsoft Office Clippey alive!? aaaaaaaah!
Table-ized A.I.
Muahahah,muahahahahahahahahaaaaa...
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
There's the dang Laws of Scale in the way of making anything small and useful. If you shrink anything by a factor of ten in length, height, and width, it has only 1/1000th the volume, and therefore only 1/1000th the horsepower. Do this a few times and friction, surface tension and static electricity rule. Your doo-thingy can't move, much less do any useful work. Don't buy any nanobot stock.
The obvious application, as this reasearch is funded by Homeland security, is first to develop grey goo, then blue goo to fight the grey goo
insert obMarxQuote here
If it gets it's power from a grid it walks on how is it unteathered?
What I need to know is if they are controlled by Dartmouth Basic.
all the best,
drew
--
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/57503
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
The Jurassic Park author wrote a reasonably entertaining book about military nano-bots becoming artificially intelligent and start acting on their own. Eventually this will be a theater movie.
I for one welcome our new less massive controllable micorobotic overlords
I didn't realise there were sofistimacated labratories in Dartmouth, NS?
Perhaps it is located in a trailer park along with chief scientists, Bubbles, Julian, and Ricky.
http://www.trailerparkboys.com/main.html
"The work was funded in part by the Department of Homeland Security, Office of Domestic Preparedness through Dartmouth's Institute for Security Technology Studies (ISTS)."
An extrapolation as to why these guys need nanobots is left as an exercise for the reader.
Bite my tiny metal ass!
Is this similar to an iron filing on an electromagnetic grid??? If it requires this mat to travel on, I see no difference. The metal filing would probably move quicker, anyhow.
Just once I'd like to see a press release where the scientists say "and it can do this useful function right now which we intend to start a spinoff company to commercialise."
If they could do that, they wouldn't need a press release.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I use EMU48 by Sébastien Carlier when I don't have access to a real calculator. The ROMs are not FOSS, but hp has released them for use in emulators.
Or we might want to consider sparrow shit and camel shit - if we had the time, that is. The mass of objects of the same size is a function of their weight. Consider, for example, the comparison between the output from a really constipated sparrow and the output from a camel with diarrhoea. Careful examination might reveal "objects" from both the camel and the sparrow of the same volume (or size) and having the same weight. If discovered, those objects might be said to have the same density (if something had to be said about them). Such discoveries would take both time and trouble, and it is not clear what they would bring to the world's store of knowlege. Upon reflection (but why, in God's name why ?), maybe ball-bearings and ballons (if inflated) may waste less time for the same result.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?