Comment I'm one of the researchers (Score 5, Insightful) 135
Let me give some straight facts through all this futuristic market speak in the articles and from my professor. Where are we now?
1. We are trying to do a proof-of-concept that a team of robots can indeed assemble structures together in a near-frictionless environment.
2. We are currently trying to build a triangle out of 3 reconfigurable beams assembled by a pair of tethered robots. With a triangle we can realize more rigid and useful structures such as trusses.
3. We are halfway there. We have achieved two-beam assembly with reconfigurable connectors and everything.
We have been working on this thing for almost a year, and one of the things you might be asking is why is this so difficult?
1. Main issue is connectors. You want to have connectors that can be automatically assembled together yet provided tight tolerances and carry heavy loads. These are often conflicting requirements and this has required a lot of tinkering to accomplish.
2. Reconfigurable connectors. These are connectors that not only automatically connect, but also automatically disconnect. Give the above requirements in 1 and this becomes doubly more difficult.
3. Precision control in a "near-frictionless" yet noisy environment. This is very difficult. Our positioning is kind of crude, our propulsion is non-linear, and the noise in the air-table is not predictable. We've been able to accomplish a lot of our results by using the tether to pull the two robots together and assemble the beams together with a rolling motion.
For those of you who are interested in seeing our latest results I recommend going to the media page at our lab here
The last video (which is surprisingly not up yet) is here
For future reference, the research involved in "evolving and adapting" has not yet been done. That is future work.
Thanks,
Jacob Everist
everist@usc.edu
