24 March 2019

Robotic 'Gray Goo'

The concept of 'gray goo', a robot comprised of billions of nanoparticles, has fascinated science fiction fans for decades. But most researchers have dismissed it as just a wild theory. Current robots are usually self-contained entities made of interdependent subcomponents, each with a specific function. If one part fails, the robot stops working. In robotic swarms, each robot is an independently functioning machine. In a new study, researchers at Columbia Engineering and MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), demonstrate for the first time a way to make a robot composed of many loosely coupled components, or particles. 


Unlike swarm or modular robots, each component is simple, and has no individual address or identity. In their system, which the researchers call a particle robot, each particle can perform only uniform volumetric oscillations (slightly expanding and contracting), but cannot move independently. The team, discovered that when they grouped thousands of these particles together in a sticky cluster and made them oscillate in reaction to a light source, the entire particle robot slowly began to move forward, towards the light. The robot has no single point of failure and no centralized control.

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