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Robot Collective Acts Like A Smart Material
“We’ve figured out a way for robots to behave more like a material,” said Matthew Devlin, a former doctoral researcher in the lab of UCSB mechanical engineering professor Elliot Hawkes, and the lead author of a paper published in the journal Science. Composed of individual, disk-shaped autonomous robots that look like small hockey pucks, the members of the collective are programmed to assemble themselves together into various forms with different material properties.
( The disk-shaped robots with gears along their exterior )
the researchers were able to tune and control the group of robots to act like a smart material: sections of the group would turn on dynamic forces between robots and fluidize the collective, while in other sections the robots would simply hold to each other to create a rigid material. Modulating these behaviors across the group of robots and over time allowed the researchers to create robotic materials that support heavy loads but can also reshape, manipulate objects, and even self-heal.(Via UC Santa Barbara.)
This robot collective seems remarkably similar to the cube being from an amazing 1938 story by Golden Age great science fiction writer Jack Williamson. In the story The Infinite Enemy, a being comprised of metallic cubes is found!
Peering down at the plain, as near the ship as he could, Lundoon saw that it was all composed of tiny, identical cubes, carefully laid to form a tilelike surface.His throat stuck. For the shimmering plain had heaved up. As if hurled by an explosive blast, a cloud of little diamond blocks came flying toward the ship. They rained down upon the flat circular deck, outside the conning tower. And they fell in a very curious way.
Lundoon had seen that each one-inch cube was joined to eight of its fellows by tiny threads of incandescence that ran from corner to corner. And they didn’t fall at random on the deck, but piled themselves into a grotesque mockery of the human form.
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