Video: 'Smart Sand' Could Self-Sculpt into Any Shape, Duplicating Objects Automatically | Popular Science
Robot Pebbles The "smart sand" would be made up of much smaller units akin to these cubes, which each contain a small amount of computing power and attach themselves to their neighbors via electropermanent magnets that allow them switch their magnetism on and off with a single jolt of electricity. M. Scott Brauer via MIT NewsIt sounds like something out of a fantasy film: a vat of sand into which you plunge a small object only to watch the sand bind together to form larger copies of the same object. Such “smart sand” isn’t exactly a reality just yet, but a team at MIT’s Distributed Robotics Laboratory (DRL) has a vision for tiny granules--“smart pebbles”--imbued with a small amount of computing power and covered in magnets on the outside. Piled together in a heap, the small amount of computing power in each grain would become a single distributed computing platform capable of shaping itself into objects, with the unneeded grains falling away to leave behind the finished product.
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[MIT News]
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