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Swarms of Solar-Powered Microbots On the Way
Mike writes to tell us that Inhabitat has an interesting article, complete with some pretty pictures, about a new solar-powered swarm robot that could be used to collect data and aid in surveillance. "These mini-robots are quite revolutionary, considering that they contain all that's necessary to collect data and relay it back using one single circuit board. In the past single-chip robots have presented significant design and manufacturing challenges due in part to the use of solder as an adhesive. These new microbots use conductive adhesive to attach the components to a double-sided flexible printed circuit board using surface mount technology. The circuit is then folded into thirds and wrapped around the ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit). On top, a solar cell generates power for the robot and delivers 3.6 V to the unit, which is enough for it to walk. Locomotion is achieved via three vibrating legs, while a fourth horizontal vibrating leg is used as a touch sensor."
Wake me up when I'm able to program these in a high level language with a decent amount of memory onboard.
solar cell generates power for the robot and delivers 3.6 V to the unit, which is enough for it to walk
... at night, when it's cloudy or indoors
So that rules out a great deal of the times and places where people are. What exactly are the users of these things expecting to spy on?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
kekeke
much, much
It's too large to be a microrobot.
Fata viam invenient.
These things look like something right out of a science-fiction movie. I wonder how expensive they are to produce? They look light enough that you could literally spray them from a passing plane to gather intel on a suspicious site.
The ultimate way to stop any physical machine nowadays is to cut off its power supply. The ability to configure swarm-based robots that use their own powers is a new milestone at creating a potentially unstoppable force.
Grey-goo requirements checklist:
1. Decentralized: check
2. Self-sustaining: check
3. Adaptable: not yet but can be potentially achieved with sufficiently complex programming
4. Self-replicating: not yet, our last bastion of hope
What a good thing it is that robots can't fsck... yet.
Dear God people!!! Has no-one read PREY!!!?!?!?!!?!!!
Somebody remembers that Gibson novel where exactly these things were made of nano components, and therefore so light that they could fly (suspend would be the more accurate word)?
OK, I 'll give them ten years to get there ...
Every time I hear the "grey goo" debate I ponder why some people love so much to hypothesize about the potential future without taking as much at a single glimpse at the past and present. The grey goo hypothesis states that, as a result of some technological advancement, there will be a matter that is able to function and replicate by consuming available background resources until all resources are consumed and turned into more grey goo. This position utterly fails to realize that there already is matter that does exactly that. It's called life.
Life already functions in the most optimal way possible at consuming energy and replicating more of its own kind. But the "grey goo" scenario doesn't happen due to a simple natural law of diminishing returns -- as more and more grey goo (or, in our case, life) is produced, the less and less marginal advantage is there at producing more of the same kind. Identical species (or in simpler cases, where there are no "individual specimens", identical biomasses (e.g. mold, grass) first spreads out by consuming the most readily available resource, but as its numbers grow and resources dwindle, it gains less and less marginal advantage at consuming more resources, and becomes its own competitor more than a co-operator. The fact that during the billions of years that life existed on Earth, Earth has not turned into a uniform mass of a single biomatter, utterly destroys the "grey goo" hypothesis.
On top of that, there is this "adaptability" thing. As grey goo spreads more and more, and becomes its own competitor, some strains of grey goo (lets call it blue goo), through trial and error, will function better when instead of cooperating with other grey goo, exploits it, for example by consuming grey goo directly rather than consuming what the grey goo consumes. In turn, the grey goo will now have to modify its behavior to not only consume and replicate but also to defend itself against blue goo. Then we get yellow goo which likewise will consume blue goo. Then we get some violet goo which adapts to the blue-yellow goo rivalry by, for example, becoming poisonous go yellow goo to consume while offering habitat protection to blue goo in exchange for some released energy from what the blue goo consumed.
This sequence goes on and on, until we get an ultimate form (brown goo) that sufficiently adapts to consciously exploit other forms of goo for its own needs, build constructed habitats for itself, wage wars on its own kind, and occasionally debate on whether all brown goo specimens originally evolved from humble grey goo, or whether they were created by some Divine Heavenly Goo instead.
Something else to fly up my nose while riding my bike.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_setae
Once they have them, things will become interesting. Or not.
I think I swallowed a bug...
Locomotion is achieved via three vibrating legs, while a fourth horizontal vibrating leg is used as a touch sensor.
I understand that there are quite a few videos about on the 'net showing the use of a horizontal vibrating "leg" as a touch sensor. Not that I frequent such sites, you understand.
???
Sounds like The Outer Limits episode called "Small Friends".
"... while a fourth horizontal vibrating leg is used as a touch sensor."
That's no leg, sweetie.
Bring the cost down to near nothing, make them self replicating, then foist them off to agriculture. Since they use nice clean energy, they can replace tractors in planting and harvesting. In between those activities, they can tend the crop. Enough of these little dudes can monitor individual plants for disease, then treat or remove affected plants. Monitor and regulate moisture for maximum effect at each plant. Heck, they could even pollinate plants since the honeybee population has been devastated in recent years.
If I had a zillion little microbots or nanobots, I could find a LOT of better uses than spying on my neighbor. My neighbors are pretty damned homely anyway, I don't WANT to watch them doing whatever they do when I can't see them!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I'm a bit startled about these new decepticon warriors. Megatrons own survailance crew!
What you are missing is that life is subject to limitations on the type of resources it can use. Nearly all animals directly need only biomass for food, oxygen and clean water. And with the balanced ecosystem the planet has, the plant kingdom creates the biomass and regenerates 'used' oxygen. A grey goo would not be subject to these limitations. It would probably be able to use several different sources of energy. If animals run out of biomass to eat, they starve to death. Grey goo could foreseeably evolve to be able to, or already be adapted to deriving energy from non-organic chemical processes, literally eating the planet - or be able to proliferate purely from solar energy. It's adaptability in short time frames, instead of over millions of years as with natural life is exactly what makes it such a frightening prospect.
livefortheswarm
Mobility
What types of environment can they move about in? Desert? Shallow water? Everything in between?
Are they small turtles or could the design be made self-righting?
Communication - Range? - Algorithm to leave a trail of relay bots for longer ranges?
Sensors
Just touch? Basically just mapping then.
Could they maybe have sensors for sniffing out explosives?
Images? - Should a paranoid person worry if they find a few of those near a window?
Pollution - Do they contain heavy metals or other toxins?
Cost - When might these things be cost effective to deploy, say in Afghanistan?
Hizook.com has some cool videos showing the micro robots moving around. Worth checking out.
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/29/i-swarm-micro-robots-realized-impressive-full-system-integration
I don't see where bearings could give any potential advantage anyways:
- Wheels are a great big joke for transportation outside of paved or relatively smooth surfaces - look at offroad vehicles, they're horrendously inefficient in every way and there's a reason they're not small. To really get around in nature with wheels would take something like a rock crawler, a necessarily large, extremely complicated and inefficient vehicle that requires a lot of skill to use successfully.
- Fuel-burning engines are impractical at very small scales and are relatively maintenance-intensive. ICEs are pretty inefficient and turbines are only practical are fairly large scales.
- And finally the bearings themselves are relatively fragile and maintenance-intensive.
The best chassis a self-replicating autonomous robot could hope for would be a biological body that can heal itself, doesn't need lubrication systems and has limbs for transportation. Maybe a self-replicating nanobot that acts as a pathogen and 'roots' raccoon bodies (agile, opposable thumbs, pretty well-armed between the claws, teeth and other pathogens they're carrying) would be a successful one. Maybe a life cycle where the bot grows like a plant, producing a sweet infected fruit that the raccoon eats, where it infects the brain and grows more "seeds" in the digestive system would work (although it would still need to reproduce with other raccoons, perhaps also passing the bot along as an STD, or the raccoons that aren't attracted to the fruit would have a selective advantage).
A good, feasible compromise would be an insect body facsimile - it could be actuated with hydraulic systems, linear electric motors or artificial muscles, all of which are fairly robust, and it could potentially allow the robot to get itself around much better than a wheeled chassis. Imagine a grasshopper-like body that has the option of crawling or taking a huge leap.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
To be sure, this class of device has potential, but as built, these are nothing but parlor tricks.
The only application I can think of is will come up if there's a retro resurgence of the Coleco vibrating football games of the 1960s.
I, for one, welcome our swarming, solar-powered, robotic overlords!
Someone needs to welcome the new solar powered overlords.
Did anybody else raise an eyebrow at this sentence, finding the notion to be perhaps a bit of a double entendre?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I, for one, welcome our new Solar-Powered Microbot Overlords.
"Locomotion is achieved via three vibrating legs, while a fourth horizontal vibrating leg is used as a touch sensor."
I'm sure these will be successful in at least one market.
As long as Gene Simmons isn't holding the control box, I'm cool.
That's it! From now on, I'm only committing crimes at night.
Have gnu, will travel.
This is one of those typical popular science articles which totally mixed up the actual present-day achievement with a grandiose vision of the future, so the reader gets a giant dose of future shock when it's not called for.
Look carefully at what's actually built. A tiny vibrating bit of metal with a touch switch. It *looks* like a little bug, but its robotic capabilities are roughly equal to that of a a doorbell.
If the vibrating legs work as claimed, it can move in an uncontrolled, hopefully straight, path. It can't turn. Its only sensor feedback is a single touch switch.
People talk a lot about "emergent systems", but the individual elements need a certain level of complexity for it to work. A pile of paperclips will never get up and walk around, no matter how big a pile you make.
IMO, these microbots don't have enough different physical inputs (sensors) and outputs (actuators) to do anything exciting. Notice what's *not* in the article: no videos of the robots doing anything. The rest of the article is just vision and vapor.
to step on one.
i think my ex-wife has one of these...
I see a large forthcoming market for Gatling guns.... and Gatling air guns in the UK, of course.
An autonomous solar powered marital aid?
and wasn't impressed by this "nano-threat 1.0". They work okay so far - on a verrry flat surface - but on shag carpet? Staircases, elevator thresholds, door jambs, etc? Not so much. I'll wait a few hundred more generations for the first "don't make me laugh" models.