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Micro-robots unveiled
spiffy1 writes "A group of Japanese electronics corporations, (Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Matsushita) have developed a 5mm by 9mm by 6.5mm robot. These robots will be used to inspect and repair power plants without need for shutdown. They can zoom between tiny pipes and wires at the rate of 2mm per second, lift nearly 1 gram, and link up with other robots to accomplish bigger tasks. "
For anyone who's ever hated insects... these things could probably be used maliciously, no?
grep -ri 'should work'
Well, this is not quite small enough for 'nanotech'. Should it be called 'millitech', then?..
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Victor Danilchenko
Do I sense a flame war? Or was That on usenet? I forget. Anyway this is quite cool. People have been talking about doing this for a long time and I'm glad to see someone finally walking the walk instead of just talking the talk.
/dev
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
The military applications are frightening. These would be useful for satellite / space station maintenace, get more done with less oxygen and all.
Jason
-jpowers
Does anyone have an idea of how these buggers are powered? Do you wind 'em up?
Wow looking at salon's main page and their tech page I cannot find any refrence for this story. It appears that slashdot is linking to salon stories before salon is. Good work guys!
--Chris
I forget where I first saw this (it might have been /. I dunno). On Freak Tech, I found the URL for FSCRs (Fractal Shape Changing Robots).
http://www.stellar.demon.co.uk/#introduction
Not quite the same thing, but similar. The FSCRs allow for multiple robots ganging together for more difficult tasks.
I wonder how long those Micro-robot critters can run without power?
----------------------------- Work Sucks - Let's Go Flying!
If ANYONE sees any info on these, like how they're powered, controlled, communication, do they have cameras on them, PLEASE post the URL! I'll be scanning for days....
-rMortyH
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I have no use for hardware with a purpose.
I found the linked article not very satisfying, does anybody know of a more technical article (i'm more interrested in how they did it)?
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Play Six Pack Man. I
And, if you are constipated, they zoom up other 'pipes' too... er, never mind...
Bryan R.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Why would robots be using ANY oxygen?
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"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
They sound like they're just the right size to be called microbots. I want one! It's a shame salon didn't have a picture... anybody seen some closeups of these babies yet?
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Sony will be selling a bunch of those as an add-on to their Aibo, so they can have robo-fleas :)
First they shrink our radios!
Then they shrink our cars!
Now its our robots!
What's next?!!
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
At that rate, they'd move 7.2 metres (23.4 feet) per hour. Power plants and industrial facilities are *big*. Unless you saturate one with bugs, your robots will take days to reach their destinations.
What's powering these suckers, if they take days to go anywhere? Either one of several unlikely broadcast power schemes is being used, or they're tethered, or they can't go more than a few tens of metres before their batteries run out.
The robots as described would have an interesting time actually fixing anything. Especially on battery power. The most useful application that I can think of would be to use them as remote cameras to see what's going wrong, but there are easier/more practical ways of doing this (put a motorized video camera on a ceiling track, for instance, and use faster tethered robots or just something like a proctoscope for getting into the pipes).
This is an incomplete list, but you get the idea. IMO, this is either a hoax or else the article has significantly munged many of the details.
There was a story on NPR last Friday about a
guy doing research on flys - how they fly and
navigate - he also works with aerodynamic engineers as well. The military interest is quite high in his findings. They figure they can eventually build fly-size flying bots for battle-field intel and such.
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
"and link up with other robots to accomplish bigger tasks."
for example, if they're battlng an evil robeast, 5 can join together: 2 arms, 2 legs "and I'll form the head!" I need these.
Form blazing sword!
this sounds alot like a couple of cartoons i used to watch... GO-BOTS and Transformers come to mind... maybe someday there will be a real life squad of decepticons running around blowing stuff up in the name of evil!!!! ROCK ON!
> ERROR: IEXPLORE caused an invalid page fault in module MSCONV97.DLL at 0137:01212d19. Stack dumped:
Have you seen the Tom Selek movie called "Runaway" about heat seeking bulltes and killer little robots.
I get that warm and fuzzy feeling when I think of 50million of these things being dropped into a school yard.
Has anybody ever read Stanislav Lem's
"The Invincible"
where a spaceship crew in search for there sistership and its crew is defeated by miniature
cooperative robots.
Quite an educative read!
Put little solar panels on there backs and have them walk under lamps powered by the generators every once in a while.
They left all sorts of questions unanswered. And they left out a picture - I wanna know what these things look like!
I doubt that they have very much processing power or a very big communications range. IMO, this is good. Smart government spy robots recording what we're saying and doing that can pretend to be flies would be decidedly bad.
I remain skeptical as to how useful linking many of them together will be - at a few milliters, capable of lifting a gram a piece, it takes a hell of a lot of them to lift anything of significant size.
-Ender
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
This is interesting. I can imagine several medical applications for this kind of robots... I wonder how they perform under extreme conditions (high pressure and high pH come to mind)
Millimeter == Micrometer, right?
that's it. these are 'millibots', not 'microbots', and are a very far cry from 'nanobots' (nano = 10^-9)
The enemies of Democracy are
although, you have to ask yourself, if the bombers were close enough to drop teeny tiny soldiers on the plant, why would they just drop, ummmm, bombs?
:)
they're sort of cheaper, faster, and more destructive.
-k. ^-^ ^D
They will be mass produced and the russians will take control of them for sure. Be sure to keep your mouth shut when you sleep, and to check before you use the crapper :)
So who would win? i guess the ants tho depends on how much the bots weigh they can lift 2x their weight and ants can do 8x... anyone know the avg weight of an ant? one thing is forsure tho.. i doubt the ants would be able to destroy these buggers... maybe drain their batterys' but thats about it..
i'm thinking child toy apps ... can you imagine owning your very own robot ant?
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if knowledge is power, the internet is god - me again
These devices MUST have reliable long-term power!
The only thing that I can think of that would work for extended periods of time would be: ElectroMagnetic broadcast power. The problem with this type of power is that it doesn't pass through impermeable material; therefore there would need to be trancievers placed profusely throughout any structure where the robots would be used.
Also, the robots themselves would probably not be autonomous but be controlled using telemetry feedback. A console station would be used to accumulate the data, formulate a strategy to accomplish a task and to broadcast instructions to individually addressed robots who could then link up to perform the task.
It's the only feasible and practical way I could see it working.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
High flying bombers could drop thousands of the little buggers from out of the range of anti-aircraft defenses, or they could be launched balistically. They should be pretty resilient to imapct, and much harder to shoot down that missiles.
What will happen when one of these things is attacked by a real live bug? Would they be tasty, or would they simply be spit out?
ATIP97.094 : Recent MITI-Sponsored Research On Micromachines
...which links to...
Micromachine Center - looks like this could be the project they refer to in the article.
An older report on Flexible Automation.
I don't have time to filter through it all just now, but others might.
--The more you know, the less you know.
This is the micromachine R&D promo page, wherein they talk about what kind of power plan operations they're designing for. It's mostly eye candy and doesn't talk about the nitty-gritty of power or control, but at least there are some pictures.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
The 1997 report leads me to believe that some of the technology required has been developed and is being integrated. A pertinent quote:
Sadly, more detail may not be available. Another quote:
Oh, go on, check out my job.
winding a robot so small would lead to many frustrated engineers... ..damn, i gort a cramp! Boss, my hand..!"
"Larry, go wind the 'bots."
"sure boss. All right, now where's the screw..? Boss, do we have a magnifying glass?"
"by the microscope."
"Oh. ok... here we go... winding, and
and so on.
winding is silly; not as a power source but instead in its application.
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fight global cooling
its a diabolical plot to kill all bug eating animals. The animal eats the robot, then the robot deposites a small but lethal dose of poison once inside. The robot then drills its way to the outside of the animal. It falls to the ground to be eaten by another bug-eating animal and the viscious cycle begins anew...
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fight global cooling
Broadcast power seems very likely.
And not just because of the link a bit further up giving the Micromachines lab stated purpose as investigating it.
These things are tiny, they can't have much a brain. Is it unreasonable to speculate they are controlled and powered on the same frequency?
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
If only they could self reproduce and clean my apartment.. Hmmm.
No no. How about a couple of thousand linking up? No one needs a 1cm Voltron. Think instead something like a T-1000 except a bit less liquidy.
The robots in question have a tiny pair of tweezers which attempts to grab stray particles. Due to Hisenberg's uncertainty principles, the particles get very upset at this and vibrate with increasing speed. This in turn powers a minature dynamo inside the little robot.
No I'm not drunk.. Wait.. Maybe.. Hmm. No
I noticed this at the end of the article:
/.er
"© 1999 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press."
Please don't flame me, I'm just a curious
Two words.
Torture Method
Think about it... one or two may not be too bad, but make a guy swallow a bunch, and ... Well... you do the math. ;)
One of my favourite SF stories.
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Yeah, and Sony will also produce a modified Aibo with a vacuum cleaner to make it a anteater :)
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
Given the size and mass of these robots I can't really imagine how they're effectively shielding them against radiation, which will hose up most delicate control circuits.
Also wouldn't the usual EM emissions of a nuclear plant or power plant interfere with the control and reporting mechanisms of these little bots?
Finally, getting a significant lens aperture for them that controllers can use might also be a problem.
Sneering at something is an admission to failure. You are claiming superior talent or insight
"They also plan to develop robots with motors and problem-detecting sensors."
Did anyone notice the above line from the Salon article? I guess what I am getting at is that this line seems to indicate that the devices the article is about aren't robots - how do you have a robot if it doesn't have motors or sensors? Most definitions of a true robot include a clause relating to the ability of the device in question to be able to sense as well as change its environment - without motors or sensors, how is it supposed to do this?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Actually you're wrong. The link includes a summary and rephrasing of the story.
Paraphrase and summary are "fair use", and not breaches of copyright.
of course, this means that *smaller* robots will have to be made to combat the other robots, which will lead to even smaller robots....