TECH SPECIAL...Soon from MIT’s lab Self-sculpting sand

Researchers are developing robotic pebbles that can stick together to form functional tools

    Imagine tiny robots that can join together to form functional tools and then split apart after use: researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are trying to developing “selfsculpting sand” that can transform into any shape or object.
    The team from the university’s Distributed Robotics Laboratory (DRL) has already developed 30 prototype “smart pebbles” and the software to run them. The sides of each pebble are 1 cm in length. Attempts are being made to create smaller models.
    “We want to have a bag of this material that can form any shape you demand,” PhD student Kyle Gilpin told the BBC. “So if you are in an isolated situation and you need a certain tool, you can tell that to the bag by making a miniaturised model.”
    He added that the bag would produce a magnified and usable copy of the tool. The prototype cubes have electropermanent magnets embedded into their sides to allow them to stick together, the BBC reported. The magnetic effect can be turned on and off and does not require electric current to stay active. The cubes also contain a microprocessor to figure out which magnets should be activated first.
    Each processor can currently store 32 kilobytes of code and has only two kilobytes of working memory. The MIT researchers will present a paper describing algorithms that could enable such smart sand at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, the world’s top robotics conference, in Minnesota, US, next month.
    Unlike existing approaches for reconfigurable robots, smart sand uses a subtractive method similar to stone carving rather than an additive method of joining LEGO blocks together, MIT News said. In the first step, smart sand will cover the original object. “The idea is that they sense the border of the original shape — if a module detects it doesn’t have a neighbour, it assumes it may be on the border of the shape,” Gilpin said.
    The pebbles will then message each other the shape of the object. They will then define themselves as the perimeter of the duplicate object. If the replicated object is supposed to be five times the size of the original, then each square surrounding the object will map onto five cubes making up the reproduced perimeter, the BBC said.
    Gilpin said a lot work needed to be done to make smart sand a reality. “It’s not something that’s going to happen in two years,” he said. “But in 10 years you might see a product on the market that starts to rival traditional manufacturing approaches.” AGENCIES
HOW IT WILL WORK
STEP 1: Smart sand will cover the original object
STEP 2: Robotic pebbles will message each other the object’s shape. They will then define themselves as the perimeter of the duplicate object
STEP 3: If replicated object needs to be 5 times the size of the original, each cube will map onto 5 blocks making up the reproduced border
STEP 4: When the recreated object has served its purpose, the pebbles will split apart

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