Year: 2022

BACK TO CLAYTRONICS after the weekend Fragment From Nature. We continue with progress on model robotics with swarm behavior drivers that exploit relatively simple intelligence units making a SUPERORGANISM with a greater intelligence. View in LinkedIn

SMART CUBES. "Each uses the momentum of flywheels spinning at up to 20,000 rotations per minute to roll over, climb on top of one another, and even leap through the air ... At the moment, the experimenters must provide the instructions for sticking together. Their plan, though, is to develop algorithms that allow the cubes themselves to decide when they need to hook up." https://lnkd.in/dzmMmjE View in LinkedIn

PRELUDE. Smart cubes are model systems to develop methods for much smaller scale units, such as Smart Sand. Progress on smart cubes has been significant, but ultimately, nanoscale structures and components will win the day. View in LinkedIn

SWARM INTELLIGENCE. "Smart module, or smart pebble, has only a small amount of processing power and memory, so individual modules cannot store a complete digital map of the object to be assembled. Each has to acquire only a certain amount of information, and by sharing pieces of data they must solve the problem collectively." https://lnkd.in/dBu7JMS View in LinkedIn

BIOINSPIRED KILOBITS. "Just as trillions of individual cells can assemble into an intelligent organism, or 1,000 starlings can form a great flowing murmuration across the sky, the Kilobots demonstrate how complexity can arise from very simple behaviors performed en masse." http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/08/the-1000-robot-swarm/ View in LinkedIn

"A ROBOT SWARM is a self-organizing multi-robot system characterized by high redundancy. Robots’ sensing and communication capabilities are local and robots do not have access to global information. The collective behavior of the robot swarm emerges from the interactions of each individual robot with its peers and with the environment. Typically, a robot swarm is composed of homogeneous robots, although some examples of heterogeneous robot swarms do exist." http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Swarm_robotics View in LinkedIn

BIG SMALL GOAL. "Shrinking the cubes remains the biggest challenge. Gilpin believes that they could eventually achieve dimensions of about 1 millimiter, in effect transforming their smart pebbles into smart sand, but that will take time." https://lnkd.in/dBu7JMS View in LinkedIn

ROBOTIC SAND. "Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool. A few seconds later, you reach into the box and pull out a full-size footstool: The sand has assembled itself into a large-scale replica of the model." And the whole thing could be recycled. https://lnkd.in/dm2MHH5 View in LinkedIn

SHAPE MEMORY POLYMERS. "The use of shape memory polymers is demonstrated for deformable, programmable, and shape-memorizing micro-optical devices. A semi-crystalline shape memory elastomer, crosslinked poly(ethylene-co-vinyl acetate), is used to prepare various micro-optic components, ranging from microlens and microprism arrays to diffraction gratings and holograms." https://lnkd.in/d3Z-dd7 View in LinkedIn

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL. "Shrinking today’s robotic pebbles and blocks to the submillimeter scale presents an enormous technical challenge, but it’s not unreasonable to imagine that advances in microelectromechanical systems might allow for such miniaturization a few decades from now." https://lnkd.in/dzmMmjE View in LinkedIn