The Ubiqutious Nanobots

Tim8o wrote to us with an article from EETimes about nanotech bots. It's an interesting piece about research being done at Xerox PARC.

Some things

[Kaufmann]

First of all, the obligatory in a Hemos story: the word "ubiquitous" is misspelled. ;)

Why is it that people have such a limited view of nanotech applications? Why is it that nobody mentions Drexler, universal assemblers, nano-built self-modifying neural networks, "true" borgification etc. anymore? This is what really matters; this is the natural path into which technological advances leads. Not some silly one-tool toolbox.

And of course... First post! Yay! :)

Legos?

[apsmith]

While this sounds pretty neat (rhombic dodecahedral "bricks" that roll across one another to self-assemble) it seems like the ultimate building brick has been around for decades: Legos! At least the things you can do with lego bricks give some perspective on what it takes to make larger structures out of smaller standard units. All that's needed is to give each lego brick some kind of mobility and control mechanisms and you'll be way beyond what these rhombic dodecahedra can do.

Or more efficient perhaps would be to have several types - assembler bricks that are motile and controllable, and which can pick up and move around other bricks, and building bricks which just sit there as structural supports. I.e. kind of like Mindstorms, but with some individual bricks that are themselves miniature, remotely controllable robots.

Some questions arise for any such scheme:
(1) Power source - do you dump a battery in each of the motile units? Or can they get energy "out of the air" somehow?
(2) Control - what degree of autonomy would each mini-bot have? I think they would still need to receive at least general instructions from "above" once in a while.
(3) Communications - the mini-bots would also probably have to communicate back at times: "Reporting for duty!", "Got a 2x6 yellow brick, where does it go?", "Bot is stuck: send assistance" Wireless ethernet?
(4) Addressability - each bot with an IP address? No wonder we needed IP v6 !

Sounds like a bunch of electronics for a mini lego-assembler, but hey, it could probably all go on a single chip and be made for under a dollar en masse. Does anything like this already exist?

Military applications?

[re-geeked]

The part about these being useful when it's not possible to carry along one of each tool would be a big help to soldiers on the move, and they do make the point that they could be macro-sized for bridges, shelters, etc.

Imagine your platoon being able to combine their bots into a temporary shelter, or a raft, or an observation platform. Then along comes a whole company, and now you've got enough for a pontoon bridge, an HQ, a barricade, etc.

Of course, these bots would be even more useful on spacecraft, but, since NASA's broke, let's get the Pentagon to spend the money on development, eh?

Re:Legos? More like Legos to the nth power.

[ken_i_m]

My first thought was Legos too. Only what we are talking about here is Super Legos.

As for the shape think of primitive digital graphics. "Jaggies" and all sorts of other artifacts due to the low-res or block nature of the pixels. Adding more sides and making them smaller makes them much smoother and flexible in the structures that can be assembled. These or their kin will be the "killer app" in the realm of Lincoln Logs/Legos/Connector Sets.

Legos? Yeah, as in what Morse Code is to TCP/IP.

ken_i_m