
Surprisingly simple scheme for self-assembling robots - grinnick
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/simple-scheme-for-self-assembling-robots-1004.html
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otoburb
If they can figure out how to wirelessly power the cubes, or allow connected
cubes to power each other via conductivity (perhaps at the cube edges), then
the self-assembly of the bridge at the scale they're aiming for makes much
more sense.

Hitting on the flywheel as the core mechanism for locomotion was amazing.

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MarcusBrutus
People 5 centuries from now will look into 20th and 21st century robotics
forays in much the same way as we look at Babbage or Heron's steam-engine.
Clever, perhaps ingenious, but hopeless with current technology.

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unwind
Alright, so what do you propose robot researchers do?

Just sit around, somehow waiting for technology to magically improve?

I might be naive, but I like to think of things like this research as the way
to _get_ the technology to improve. It's not as if technology has a life of
its own and will just improve regardless.

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MarcusBrutus
I propose that they go fishing and wait it out till there's some game-changing
breakthrough in some underlying technology. I'm not sure which are the right
underlying technologies in much the same way as Babbage's critics couldn't
identify "integrated circuit" as the missing enabler. Could be advances in
materials, nanotechnology, even biotechnology. What I know for sure is that
when these breakthroughs do happen, all 20th and 21st robotics "pioneering"
work will become obsolete and will not serve future practitioners. Robotics is
not like mathematics where you can lay a foundation that'll still be relevant
and useful to people 10 or 20 centuries down the line. If Babbage instead of
fussing with mechanical cranks and gears had invented the Turing machine his
life's work wouldn't have gone to waste.

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jlarocco
If they can't identify the "missing enabler," then how are they to know it's
missing?

Breakthroughs don't just happen and change everything. In almost every case
there's a lot of background work, like this stuff, that builds up to the
breakthrough.

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MarcusBrutus
They don't have to identify it and they don't have to know it's missing. My
whole point is that the breakthroughs will happen in some other technology
tree, and they will most likely occur in the context of some more mundane,
profit-seeking commercial endeavors, in much the same way that advances in
metallurgy and machine tool technology enabled the steam engine although the
basic principle and some crude prototypes were already available since
classical antiquity. What's been happening since the 1950s in robotics (I am
not talking Toyota car factory robotics) is simply a misallocation of
taxpayer's capital and hurts science and technological advancement since it
fails to allocate research capital in the way most likely to lead to
sustainable, economically exploitable breakthroughs. Of course all that pales
in comparison to money wasted in social "sciences" etc.

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pjc50
This is not only unsupported assertion but moving the goalposts so far that
one of them is in orbit.

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ChuckMcM
Ok, that is the coolest thing I've seen in a while. Love the comment that they
haven't taken to heart the Replicator storyline from SG-1.

The idea of exploiting the inverse square law to promote control over
positioning is pure genius.

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yk
This is a great demo. However I wonder, with one flywheel, they should only be
able to rotate the individual robots along a single plane? ( And I am somewhat
curious, what collective motion of more than one robot looks like. )

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menage
Presumably the flywheel axis can be rotated internally.

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thedufer
From the one look of the internals (1:50 in the video), there does not appear
to be room to rotate the flywheel axis. That said, I would expect that is
where they're headed when they can figure out how to use some of the space
more efficiently.

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olefoo
You could have three sets of contra-rotating flywheels, which would give you
much finer grain control of the motion.

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thedufer
I thought about this possibility, but having 3 flywheels increases the weight,
which decreases the maximum angular momentum / weight that could be applied
around a given axis. This is, I believe, the relevant quantity if you want to
know how far a cube could jump in a different direction.

If the flywheel could rotate on two axes (and spin on the third, presumably),
you would still have full control on which direction you apply forces.

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transfire
Scale size down 10 to 100 fold, add LCD faces and orchestrate a million of
them, then Holy Molly!

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yk
That will give the SPAM-Wave a hole new meaning.

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codereflection
I love this. Another great example of being told "that can't be done", and
getting to prove those naysayers wrong.

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eli_gottlieb
_This_ is the kind of stuff we mean when we say, "Go beyond the impossible,
and kick logic to the curb."

Kol ha'kavod!

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smackfu
Those little blocks look packed full of electronics. Only simple when you put
a skin on it.

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HPLovecraft
Roger Waters would LOVE these for his Live Wall show lol

