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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