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A Thousand Kilobots Self-Assemble Into Complex Shapes
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Harvard's Self-Organizing Systems Research Group—describe their thousand-robot swarm in a paper published today in Science (they actually built 1024 robots). In the past, researchers have only been able to program at most a couple hundred robots to work together. Now, these researchers have programmed the biggest robot swarm yet. Alone, the simple little robot can't do much, but working with 1,000 or more like-minded fellow bots, it becomes part of a swarm that can self-assemble into any two-dimensional shape. These are some of the first steps toward creating huge herds of tiny robots that form larger structures—including bigger robots."
What could possibly go wrong?
I mis-read and thought this said "A Thousand Killbots Self-Assemble Into Complex Shapes..."
Now THAT would be interesting!
Prey?
640 kilobots ought to be enough for anybody.
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A Thousand Kilobots
So that's like, what, 1024000 bots?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Here we have... a sheet!
Here we have... a more different sheet!
Here we have an elongated sheet.
Here we have a sheet with a hole in it!
Kinda reminds me of the Microcons assembling themselves to create ReedMan in "Revenge of the Fallen".. Spooky..
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Other than the fact that fabricating that many 'bots is painful and expensive, what makes this different from The Game of Life (albeit with an algorithm that takes more than a couple of lines.) I just don't see how this is any different from running a simulation of robots forming "any 2-D shape"... what was learned by actually building them?
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Well we almost have the ammo, now we just need DARPA to work on our Empees to fire it. Although hopefully we can find something better than a spandex unitard as a uniform/battle armor.
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Alone, the simple little robot can't do much, but working with 1,000 or more like-minded fellow bots, it becomes part of a swarm that can self-assemble into any two-dimensional shape.
I'm pretty sure this means that working with 1,000 or more like-minded fellow bots, it still can't do much.
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I remember, as TFA mentions, these wondrous little $14 robots. Except if you're not Harvard, the distributors are charging about $125 for each one, and hundreds more for the programmer and charger.
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It's sort of cool, I guess, but I don't see the benefit of actually building physical robots rather than running a simulation. What has been achieved in the real world doesn't seem to have any practical application, even as an advertising gimmick or a work of sculpture.
I can't imagine sending out 100,000 of these gadget to do the half-time show at a football game, for example.
I didn't sense that this was just the beginning and that the same devices that self-assemble predetermined shapes could, with more advance software, harvest wheat or perform laser surgery.
When they reach the point where the simulated behavior actually has some real-world utility, THEN it makes sense to build them.
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I can't see anything here that couldn't be achieved through a software simulation?
The difference between theory and practice is
- in theory, there is no difference
- in practice, there is.
A simulation of self-assembling robots is theory.
An actual pile of 1,024 self-assembling robots is practice.
Less tritely, you have zero information about flaws in your simulation until you try to apply it to/in the real world. Your simulation is excellent at helping you identify logical flaws in your design. But if you fail to account for something (crosswinds, say), then your simulation simply won't help you find it.
It's that whole "unknown unknowns" thing, man.
Sounds scarily like a precursor to StarGate's "replicators"...
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If I recall correctly Stanislav Lem wrote something like this in the "The Cyberiad". A small robots which obtain intelligence only in groups.
... when they can look like Carter -- without the pesky evil tendencies.
And "... can achieve complex global behavior from the cooperation of many limited and noisy individuals." -- where I work, we have prior art on "many limited and noisy individuals"... :-|
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these babies! (Sorry, I'm still on a retro kick.)
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Pretty sure if you send in 100,000 autonomous robots to form into geometric shapes at a football game, they will more less instantly spontaneously evolve into deadly killing machines bent on the destruction of humankind...
Is it one thousand kilobots (1000000) or one thousand killbots (1000) or one thousand kibibots (1024000)?
In the article they say it's 1024 bots, so whoever typed that title is probably smoking supercapacitors.
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Somebody stop them, they're developing Replicators! Remember Stargate: SG1? Took them bloody forever to defeat the goddamn things!
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A thousand thousandbots?