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."

Comments

Serious question

[Frogbert]

Okay I have a serious question, is there any reason we can't create robots specifically designed to build an exact copy of themselves only half as small? Wouldn't this allow us to have teeny tiny robots in a few months?

Re:Serious question

[kebes]

Well such an idea sounds reasonable enough. In fact in Richard Feynman's "plenty of room at the bottom" famous speech, he describes something similar: building small machines that are then used to build even smaller machines, until finally you have atomic-scale machines. This speech is considered by many to be the "original idea" for nanotechnology.

So why don't we have nanobots yet? Well it turns out its a little more complicated than that. The basic problem is that designs for large-scale robots do not work at smaller scales. You can take macroscopic engineering principles and scale them up or down to a point, but eventually they break down. The design of a 200ft long bridge is not just a 4X scale version of a 50ft bridge, after all.

If you read Drexler's technical book on the subject (Nanosystems) he goes into detail on how various properties (strength, elasticity, conductivity) scale down to the nano realm. Some of them scale favorably, whereas others do not. Thus nano-scale robots will not merely be "small versions" of macro robots. For instance the viscosity of a liquid becomes much more important than gravity, at small scales (whereas at large scales dealing with inertia and gravity are important).

My point is that robots cannot simply build exact (but smaller) copies of themselves. The half-sized robots will be useless within a generation or two, and will require new designs, optimized for that size. (Added to that, robot designs that are self-replicating are not trivial to begin with, at any size-scale!)

Re:Serious question

[v1]

A lot of things don't scale well. For example, if you have a bearing wtih a very small tolerance to roll around in, if you shrink the entire thing down to say, 50% its size, the bearing will sieze because the gap is not large enough to allow the grease molicules to move around anymore. You can't shrink the grease molicules so they don't fit right anymore.

Electrical insulators are a certain thickness to protect against arcing of a certain voltage. If you cut the thickness of an insulator in half and don't cut the voltage in half, the insulator will likely be compromised by the voltage and you'll get a short or an arc.

Certain effects, such as viscosity and magnetism, don't change linearly with change in distance. When two magnets get twice as close as they used to be, the attractive/repulsive forces are now four times as great. Since you've probably also just cut your structure thicknesses in half, they are now much weaker, and the magnets being stronger produces an exponentally rising imbalance. In the end the magnets will deform your construction.

When mechanical devices get very small, they also encounter new hazards you take for granted. A grain of sand in a gas tank isn't a big deal, until the gas tank has shrunk to 1cc. Minor vibration or mechanical shock becomes more dangerous in some respects, and becomes nonexistent in others. Parts that are designed to float with eachother will stick since they are not receiving the benefitial effects of vibrations normally present.

Combustion and other important chemical and physical reactions work very differently at larger and smaller scales.

Other factors also cause problems at small scales. Capilary effect, static attraction, surface tension, it's a whole new world when you get really small, especially when any liquids are involved. I think that's why we have physics, astrophysics, and quantum physics... the rules change when you radically alter size.

So there are actually a lot of things to consider when trying to shrink something. It's not just a matter of making all the parts smaller.

Re:Serious question

[AaronLawrence]

Has anyone even made a robot that can build a replica of itself, by itself?

Size matters.

[imunfair]

The article says they're 3cm x 1.5cm, yet the image shows robots the size of red blood cells. Someone is an idiot, I hope the image wasn't provided by the people making these things, because I personally don't want swarms of defective robots flying around trying to pollinate my eyes or something like that.

Just imagine riding along at 50mph on a motorcycle and swallowing a flying microrobot - sounds painful. (The article doesn't really say if they move by air - but swarm makes me think of flying bugs.)

Scared Me for a Second There

[Comatose51]

I was doing a search on my Google personalized homepage that has a RSS feed from Slashdot. For a second there, I read "Swarms of Microsofts Over Europe". Whew!

Re:Robots

[interiot]

Umm, if the means of production is completely in the hands of robots, there's no reason not to radically restructure the economy and go to something more like socialism, because there's no reason for humans to be forced to consistently generate productive output. Personally, if someone told me I was allowed to spend my whole time studying physics or math or producing silly flash animations, I'd be overjoyed.

Roland and Slashdot--is there a connection?

[Overly Critical Guy]

Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?

I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at www.primidi.com [primidi.com]. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (www.primidi.com [primidi.com]) to see it for yourself.

Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now let's talk about money. Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ [blogads.com], Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index. jhtml). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (http://www.uk.clara.net/clarahost/advanced.php) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this wri

Self-organizing networks

[jheath314]

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.

These robots are very small (about 1.5 cm by 3 cm)

[Brad1138]

"Such robot swarms are expected to perform 'a variety of applications, including micro assembly, biological, MEDICAL or cleaning tasks"

They may be small but it would take a heck of a needle to inject them into your arm. OUCH!

Re:What happens when...

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Imagine thousands small, spider like robots invading your house throught ventilation shafts, sewers, etc. while you are sleeping."

It's not all bad. Imagine Tom Cruise crashing through your window and asking to borrow your bath tub!

Re:Robots

[jruesch]

If the means of production is entirely in the hands of the robots what makes you think they will want to produce food and water and housing to keep the silly humans alive that are only producing inefficiencies within the system. Humans would be considered vermin.

Re:Robots

[moro_666]

you're stuck in illusions.

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 ... so there you go.

Mixed results portrayed as miracle:

[Hartree]

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.