The term “robot swarm” has a rather menacing tone to it, but large groups of tiny robots are on the forefront of robotics research. Working together, hundreds or thousands of little robots could do things that one or two large robots never could. Mike Rubenstein, an engineer at Harvard, was part of the team that invented Kilobots: itty-bitty robots that can be controlled as a swarm with a single command.

The little bots look a lot like the tiny aliens in the movie ‘Batteries Not Included’ (sans the abilities to fly, convey emotions, or tug at heartstrings). They are about the diameter of a quarter and rest on three thin metal legs. Each sports a cute little metal spring on top. Rubenstein’s ingenious method for charging his swarm of 1,024 Kilobots is to push them up against a long charging rack. Two of their legs and the top spring have to touch the rack in order for the bots to recharge.

Once juiced up, the little guys are ready to do the engineers’ bidding. They can be ordered en masse with a single command to take any solid form, though it takes up to 12 hours for them to complete that form. The Kilobots aren’t just an adorable novelty act; they could be used in the future to search collapsed buildings for survivors, scout dangerous territory for military missions, or even act as self-assembling building blocks to form mission-essential equipment in space.

One of the biggest challenges so far has been producing robots that are inexpensive as well as effective. In order for robot swarms to be practical, they have to be affordable in large numbers. In their current form, Kilobots cost around $14 each just in parts. The need to limit the cost also results in the need to limit their functionality, as adding more functions would of course increase the price of each bot. But the Kilobots aren’t intended to be a solution to the question of how to utilize robot swarms; they are simply a step forward in the quest to produce tiny robots that do our bidding on command, and they’re a pretty amazing advance in the robot swarm arena.

(via: PopSci)

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Today, 3D printing allows for user-controlled creation of nearly anything one can imagine. Tomorrow, perhaps the creation won’t be driven by the user but by the material itself. That’s the focus of a project from MIT professor Daniela Rus and student Kyle Gilpin, who are developing something they call “smart sand.” The “sand” is a self-assembling building material that could be used for a stunning array of applications, from medical to household to construction and beyond.

The current prototype is much, much larger than the team envisions the finished product being. If the eventual individual objects will be “sand,” then the size of the current prototype objects is closer to pebbles. At 10mm across, each module contains a processor and magnets that allow it to stick to other modules. In order to shrink the modules significantly, the researchers will need to find a different way to connect the modules – one that can work on a sand-size level.

At a smaller size, the smart sand modules will surround an object and “learn” its dimensions, then disassemble and reassemble themselves into an exact replica, or a replica at a different scale. They could be used as smart scaffolding for helping bones and organs regrow, then disassemble and exit the body when no longer needed. Of course, any practical applications of this technology are a good decade in the future…but that gives scientists that much longer to come up with awesome ways to use smart sand.

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Your Swiss Army knife may soon look more like a folding napkin than a bulky piece of metal in your pocket. A team at MIT and Harvard recently developed self-folding fiberglass sheets, only as thick as a human hair, that can can fold themselves into any number of pre-programmed shapes.

Eventually the sheets will be able to form large objects, but today they’re more like self-folding origami. When a bit of electricity is applied to the embedded wires, the sheets can form themselves into boat and airplane shapes. Future generations of the design will use pre-programmed “stickers” to tell the sheets which shape to take. Eventually, we may have self-folding silverware sets that fit between the pages of a book.

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Imagine carrying only one tool when you set out to fix a leaky pipe or change the oil in your car. That could be possible in the future with shape-shifting tools that morph to become whatever size and shape you require. Self-reconfiguring robots have been a dream of scientists for a very long time now, but current technology makes them nearly impossible. So far, most of the research in the field has focused on shape memory materials, which have a long list of limitations. But now, research is leaning toward shape-shifting robots made up of cell-like modules; the small shapes reconfigure themselves into whatever form is needed. DARPA is interested in the future of self-configuring robotics and recently dedicated $4 million to a set of six-month studies that will explore the possibilities of programmable matter, self-configuring robots, claytronics and other similar technology.

The above video shows the direction that the research is going in. So far, a robot composed of cell-like modules is able to rebuild itself after being kicked into pieces. But obviously, this robot wouldn’t be of use to anyone for much more than entertainment. Researchers involved in this project and others hope that eventually, the self-assembling machines will be much smaller – maybe even the size of individual grains of sand. When the “smart sand” is given a command, it would assemble itself into a tool or machine based on the user’s need; after the job is done, the tiny “sand” grains would simply return to their dissembled resting state or morph into the tool needed for the next task. This would be a huge advantage for astronauts, for example, who only have limited space for carrying tools. So far, only small arrays have been built: the largest contained 50 modules. And of course, the overarching problem of controlling each individual module would have to be addressed before the technology could be used practically. But whatever happens, hopefully we’ve learned enough from movies to stay away from artificially intelligent self-assembling assassins.

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If there’s one thing that can make us squeal like excited little girls in pigtails, it’s nanorobotics. It may not sound like the most thrilling cross segment of science, but nanobots can go anywhere. They can do almost anything. They can reconstruct parts of a damaged human body, perform microscopic surgical procedures, manipulate our environment, build machines – the list goes on and on. And one of the more thrilling possibilities is programmable matter, or items that change shape and function based on what you need them for. Believe it or not, we’re probably no more than a few years away from seeing programmable matter items become an everyday reality.

The technology is called claytronics, and it basically involves using itty-bitty robots as building blocks – or three-dimensional pixels, if you will. The building blocks themselves are called claytronic atoms, or “catoms” for short. The Intel Research Center team working on the project is aiming to make the tiny bots just 100 microns across, or about one-tenth of a millimeter. That’s crazy-tiny, but still allows plenty of room for a “brain,” some data storage and sensors to let the bots interact with each other and their surroundings.

The catoms will be able to take on any shape when programmed to do so. They can morph on command, connect with other catoms, change color, and completely shift their configuration to suit the user’s will. The possibilities for this technology are nearly endless – though we prefer to think of the benign possibilities (like hand-held computers that morph into legwarmers) rather than the scary ones (like a big freaking T1000 bent on world domination or something). So far, the best realizations of claytronics have been two-dimensional and rather boring. But they will soon get smaller, smarter, 3D-er, and much more capable. And when they do, they’ll make their way into hospitals and medical equipment before finally becoming affordable and versatile enough for consumer products. We’ll be holding our breath like spoiled little schoolgirls until then.

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