Swarms of Microrobots Over Europe? 161
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."
Robots (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Robots (Score:2)
having automatic stuff around is nice, but to be jobless because of this can't be fun. luckily robots can't make software nor administrate it properly for a while so we're all saved for now.
but you should worry about the future
#be afraid of the robots
Re:Robots (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Robots (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Robots (Score:1)
Re:Robots (Score:2)
Re:Robots (Score:1)
Re:Robots (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Unchecked Human Greed (Score:2)
You also need fusion to do this. And probably room-temperature superconductors and space elevators. All achievable in the 21st century, though.
The trouble will come when governments try to limit people to their share of the wealth. If you have to repress people with violence because their innate greed (bred in by evolution) isn't scalable there
Re:Robots (Score:2)
You are in the minority. Most humans are incapable of handling an environment where they are not integrated into some hierarchy that makes them feel both wanted and to some extent powerful. Different social systems are merely different ways of apportioning the wanted/powerful ratio amongst individuals. Totalitarian and free-market systems are based on different
Re:Robots (Score:1)
How we could transition into such a world without society crashing and burning, given the economic problems caused by lots of work "going away" is an interesting problem.
Re:Robots (Score:2)
Duh, its already happening.
Have you ever tried making bread from scratch the old fashioned way? It was an all day affair. So was laundry and getting the dust out of the house. Machines took over these jobs or vastly reduced the time and effort to do them.
This mechanization has over the last hundred years helped cause a workplace revolution as millions of women now had enough free time to enter the workforce.
These millions of people looking for work didn't cause the destruction of society, but merely cau
Re:Robots (Score:2)
Re:Robots (Score:2)
I have -- a few years ago I used to make a several loaves a week (using just flour, water, eggs, yeast/sourdough and salt).
It's (1) utterly simple, and (2) takes about half an hour of real work. There's additional "waiting time" but you can obviously do other things then (this makes it less suitable for lifestyles where your schedule is always highly uncertain
Your original point i
Re:Robots (Score:2)
Re:changing times (Score:1)
Re:changing times (Score:1)
I seem to recall a scene that means this much in Metropolis. The problem is old, as old as civilization. Back when there were kings, counts and whathaveyou that owned all the land and forced the peasants to pay exorbitant rents that barely left anything for the peasants themselves (these masters taking so much that the peasants starve has been a topic in books and plays for millenia now). Then came urbanization and the industria
Dog Pod Grid? (Score:1, Funny)
Serious question (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Serious question (Score:1)
Re:Serious question (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] technical book on the subject (Nanosystems [zyvex.com]) 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!)
Obligatory Futurama quote (Score:1)
Re:Serious question (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Serious question (Score:2)
Re:Serious question (Score:1)
Re:Serious question (Score:2)
Unfortunately it'll still get it wrong occasionaly, and succesive generatiions will be progressively less capable than the previous ones - which is the main reason that "grey goo" is pretty unlikely.
Now, there is a way of building a device that can self-replicate using only very comonly available materials, can error-correct so that few errors in replication occur, and those that do don't cause the device to become totaly non-functional, but rather just make it behave sli
Re:Serious question (Score:2)
The Republican Party?
Re:Serious question (Score:1)
Although, I wonder if he ever read Waldo & Magic, Inc [wikipedia.org] by Robert A Heinlein which was written in 1940. Its been a few years since I read it, but I'm sure th
Re:Serious question (Score:2)
So I should believe some guy with a slashdot user number nearing the one million mark who poopoos the idea over the guy who in his mid-20's worked on the atomic bomb and who was sought out by Bohr to chat over difficult Physics concepts about what is and isn't possible and says that this is possible?
Re:Serious question (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:1)
ie, if you can get away with a vibrating beam rather than a rotational motor then do so.
Remember to build your robots using assembler language rather than visual basic.
Re:Serious question (Score:1)
Allow a percentage of robots to die off because their tolerences were out of bounds, the rest will thrive and build the next generation.
It is survival of the fittest.
Re:Serious question (Score:1)
Also an easy way to end the world in the grey-goo method.
Read Micheal Chrichton's Prey - I'm sure there are better books out there about the topic, but I can't think of any off the topic of my head, and at least it gets across the point that evolution into macro-organisms is impossible to control totally on something nanoscale - though it may be in the designers' interest.
Grey Goo is the new Nuclear Annihilation, and I'm of the opinion that it'
Re:Serious question (Score:1)
Re:Serious question (Score:1)
Using extreme heat (nothing withstands the temperatures of a fusion bomb) would be fairly effective at wiping out nanostructures as would certain types of radiation (though those have to be adjusted to the nanostructure) or chemicals. Not every weakness could be evolved away easily and perfect protection will probably be impossible. What UV radiation doesn't
Re:Serious question (Score:2)
The solution! (Score:2)
Didn't Rick Moranis [imdb.com] have this covered pretty well? Maybe he should have given that science career more thought before moving on to country music [rickmoranis.com]?
Re:Serious question (Score:1)
Good book, btw.
qz
Sounds Familiar... (Score:2)
Re:Sounds Familiar... (Score:1)
Re:Sounds Familiar... (Score:2)
Size matters. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.)
Re:Size matters. (Score:2)
The articles give confused messages on the size of these things. One minute they're of order a few centimetres; the next, they're injecting liquid into biological cells; following that, lined up next to a ruler measuring a few millimetres.
Just how ruddy big are these things?!
Re:Size matters. (Score:2)
Re:Size matters. (Score:2)
Re:Size matters. (Score:1)
Re:Size matters. (Score:2)
Obviously the intelligent designer screwed up in a imperial-to-metric measurement conversion at some point...
Scared Me for a Second There (Score:3, Funny)
Just don't take any pictures (Score:1)
Ahh, I get it. (Score:2)
Roland and Slashdot--is there a connection? (Score:2, Informative)
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 reputab
Re:Roland and Slashdot--is there a connection? (Score:2)
You dont have to read the articles.
I have a link in my sig with a discount coupon if you use it I earn a few dollars and you save 90. Who cares? If you dont like it go somewhere else are disable sigs.
Re:Roland and Slashdot--is there a connection? (Score:2)
Re:Roland and Slashdot--is there a connection? (Score:1)
it supports plagarism? (Score:2)
WRTFA Anyway? (Score:1)
Re:Roland and Slashdot--is there a connection? (Score:1)
Blow me down, and knock me over with a feather, but if I'm right this guy is providing an intelligent aggregation of information, unlike RSS, and making some sort of living while he's at it. Obviously he's a terrorist. Don't visit his web site; you might get blown up.
So what if he's plagiarising; we aren't talking about the Washington Post here, or the New York Nonsense. If the guy means to be taken seriously, rather than just making a livin
Please stop modding this garbage up (Score:1)
I think most of you are aware of the controversy [google.ca]
Here's my advise to the guy with the ax to grind: you've submitted this rant often enough. Go take a huff of lithium and stop bogging down the discussions with OT copy-paste posts. If you don't like Roland's stuff, add him to your filter list.
Here's my advice to everyone else: stop modding t
Re:Roland and Slashdot--is there a connection? (Score:1)
Re:Roland and Slashdot--is there a connection? (Score:1)
Re:Roland and Slashdot--is there a connection? (Score:2)
No; the "additional details" link is another of his blogs. And whereas Slashdot adds a "nofollow" to the submitter's link, (to discourage link spamming), it does not to ones in the story. And his "additional details" are either copied from the prinmary souce, or found by a cursory Google search.
Re:Roland and Slashdot--is there a connection? (Score:2)
Even if he's living in his Mom's basement, nobody can live on $647 a month. That's below federal poverty lines. So this has to be a hobby, or he's in high school. It's hard to get worked up over a max of $7764 a year - that's probably not worth his time to write the blog. Maybe he's just bad at math. If he is in high school, good for him for trying to make a blog, even if he's made some bad judgements on source attributions during his freshman year. I have no
Re:Roland and Slashdot--is there a connection? (Score:1)
Is he hurting anybody? Well, how would you feel if you were a real journalist and some punk was copying your words -- your hard work -- without attribution and getting paid for it? Journalists aren't exactly on the same pay scale as American lawyers...
And do you think this guy is paying taxes? Or even reporting to the IRS? Even at $8000k/year, THEY would care.
Re:Roland and Slashdot--is there a connection? (Score:2)
I think it's closer to $2000/mo, but the question of 'is he hurting anybody' depends entirely on your philosophy on the role of central government as a social safety net. If you accept that millions of people in India go without clean water and electricity and don't think that's New Dehli's responsibility, then no he's not hurting anybody. If you think India can compete so eff
Re:Roland and Slashdot--is there a connection? (Score:2)
Re:Roland and Slashdot--is there a connection? (Score:2)
CmdrTaco addressed this in an article a couple months ago (as I recall). He mentioned that some people will submit multiple articles per day. Now if Mr. Piquapackofpickledpeppers is only getting between 4 and 10 submissions accepted each month, I doubt anywhere near all of his submissions are accepted. Taco also said
Self-organizing networks (Score:2, Insightful)
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
So... what are they doing? (Score:2)
[...] first was a medical or biological application, in which the robot was handling biological cells, injecting liquid into them [...] second scenario was micro-assembly, in which the robot soldered tiny parts. The final scenario looked at atomic force, with the robot mounting atomic force and doing experiments on it."
Were the bots in a body and injecting cells? Did they solder parts that we can't do with normal chip ma
hmmn (Score:1)
3 words (Score:1)
Re:3 words (Score:2)
Back to robots. TFA seems a little confused with dimenions, and I know they're no-where near close (yet), but I really think that anyone planning to make self replicating nano-bot really should read Crichton's book....
4 words (Score:1)
qz
Re:4 words (Score:1)
Re:3 words (Score:1)
These robots are very small (about 1.5 cm by 3 cm) (Score:2, Funny)
They may be small but it would take a heck of a needle to inject them into your arm. OUCH!
DDoS (Score:1)
Forget about distributed denial of service attacks. Past studies show that all you need to take them down are a couple of jedi (which, if I recall, Europe's voter registration implies they have thousands of) and a really annoying little kid.
Re: (Score:2)
Zen and the art of the nano (Score:2)
A postulated swarm of thousands (why not millions?) of:
Isn't it cool? (Score:1)
That's not Zen (Score:2)
And the project ended last year (Score:2)
Roland the Plogger strikes again.
Personally... (Score:1)
Umm Didn't I see this (Score:1)
Re:Umm Didn't I see this (Score:2)
Mixed results portrayed as miracle: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Get a life Roland (Score:2)
I for one... (Score:2)
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you."
Most Awkword Ever (Score:1)
*yawn* wake me up when they exist (Score:2)
i remember these little bots from somewhere... (Score:1)
I am scared shitless.
Several collaborative robotics projects by the EU (Score:1)
http://www.cogniron.org/ [cogniron.org] and http://www.neurobotics.info/ [neurobotics.info] are probably the most interesting and better organized than the mentioned http://www.i-swarm.org/ [i-swarm.org].
Of course that single-digit project founding is just a droplet in the ocean as it would need an apollo program to make profound progress. On the other hand, society has rarely focused its resources on the important and promising technologies
Re:I, for one... (Score:2)
Re:What happens when... (Score:2)
these robots become self-aware and try to take over the world?
They already did, and you did not notice.Re:What happens when... (Score:2, Funny)
It's not all bad. Imagine Tom Cruise crashing through your window and asking to borrow your bath tub!
Re:What happens when... (Score:1)
Re:One question?? (Score:1)
Come on, it's not that bad (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Come on, it's not that bad (Score:2)
Click on the "additional details" link and see where that takes you.
Re:Come on, it's not that bad (Score:2)
Re:Come on, it's not that bad (Score:2)