Slashdot Mirror
Swarms of Microrobots Over Europe?
Roland Piquepaille writes "In 'Mini robots to undertake major tasks?,' IST Results describes a EU-funded project which allowed to build several kinds of microrobots in the last three years. These robots are very small (about 1.5 cm by 3 cm), have limited on-board intelligence and are wirelessly controlled by a central robot control system. A follow-on project has already started, with an even more ambitious goal: deploy 'real' swarms of up to 1,000 robot clients. Such robot swarms are expected to perform 'a variety of applications, including micro assembly, biological, medical or cleaning tasks.' Read more for additional details, pictures and references about this follow-on project not described by the article mentioned above."
As a proof of concept, they meant well, but started off down the wrong path by having these things centrally controlled.
Central control will work for a few hundred machines, maybe even a few thousand, but you'll run into major bottlenecking issues when you've got these things small enough to use clouds of millions or billions. Moreover, central control requires needlessly high bandwidth, when you have a single decision-maker in charge of things which could more easily be handled at the local level. Think about how well your company would work if you had to route every single decision through the CEO, no matter how trivial the matter may be.
The challenge of networks is to get rid of the central controller which still achieving controlled behavior. Distributed control through self-organizing networks is a certainly difficult, but it's the only way to fly.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
you're stuck in illusions.
...
...
... so there you go.
companies that make the robots and companies that use the robots will get all the money and profit. you'll be unemployed and dream about a robot that would you earn enough money to buy a cup of coffee
it will take ages before you get this 'common wealth', and i don't want to see zillion workless people around until the companies understand that the money really isn't worth a thing
bill gates could probably buy a notebook for every damn developer in the world, but is he doing it ? nope
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
They started off to build 7 robots and have them work collaboratively. They actually built only one.
So, instead of just saying that, they highlight results that say they've shown several things to be possible (that really didn't seem likely to be impossible in the first place, as they are already done with existing micromanipulation systems. Cellular injection is pretty common stuff.), by doing similar things with a robot orders of magnitude larger than the ones they are aiming for.
Then, they announce a follow on project where they really, no, really this time, are going to build swarms of collaborative microbots.
You just have to keep funding us.