GENOMICON

Further to Why Robots Paint is this:

A Lego Artbot… but really it’s a piece of performance art that just happens to produce drawings.

It’s a Scribblebot that uses people’s eye-movements to do whatever it does.

more here : www.nilsvoelker.com

And it’s beautiful I think, but the objects it creates are about as much to do with art as dipping a dancer’s toes in ink and getting them to dance on a canvas. It’s all in the execution.

It would be truly tragic on all sorts of levels if someone managed to make a vitamin-free reprap out of lego before the offspring of Darwin et al managed it. Can’t see it happening in a hurry though… or more accurately, if/when we get to a point where a 3D printer or CNC router can produce shiny plastic things to the same engineering tolerances of Lego… then the world will truly have changed. Big time.

So obviously I’m interested in this partly because it’s made out of Lego and has machine guns that fire metal balls etc:

I mean who wouldn’t be?

The main reason I’m interested though is that it’s has First-Personalisation Capabilities… ie: you can see through its eyes.

This is something that Cati Vaucelle did as a research project at MIT Media Laboratory / Tangible Media Group.

An idea that has huge potential I think… I can see us getting to a stage where our robotics become good enough that a lot of people spend more time embodying a robot than being in their own skin, so to speak. Imagine a surgeon’s rig… instead of being next to a patient she operates through a machine – with 6 arms and microscope eyes.

She can perform keyhole surgery where she sees from the POV of a micro bot (also with 6 arms and microscope eyes) right inside someone’s body.

Meantime, she’s sitting in her living room, 12,000 miles away and later that day she’ll perform 3 more operations, all on different continents.

This could go in a million different directions. It’s one of the most exciting technologies that hasn’t quite happened yet that there is I think. Want to be a bird? Want to be a plane? Want to go on a safari hunting spiders 10 times bigger than you?

Meantime… it’s toys and weapons though. Until robotics technology catches up.

This is from Tinkerkit – an “Arduino-compatible physical computing prototyping toolkit aimed at design professionals.”

Which looks like a step in the direction of lowering the learning curve required for people to build their own gadgets. Not commercially available yet, but looks pretty interesting.

Recently, Forrest Higgs over on the Clanking Replicator Blog was bewailing/bemoaning the fact that the exponential rise in the number of reprappers in the world is not due to them going forth and multiplying, but because they’ve essentially become more-or-less out-of-the-box, consumer items composed entirely of vitamin parts.

And obviously he’s quite right… but then that will happen, because the entire planet and the entire internet are together operating as one giant reprap machine… and if the parts can be more easily sourced from outside the experimental confines of a single machine, then chances are they will be. Everything is memetics… and whatever allows the virus to spread fastest will win. For a time.

So here’s what I think he/they/we should do:

Use repraps to make lego.

Ok, obviously you can’t do that, because the engineering tolerances for lego are about .0001 of a mm, but lego has kindof become a defacto rapid-prototyping tool in its own right. I’ve mentioned it often enough on this blog – everything from art to rubiks cube robots… and there’s a blog post over here, entitled 2008: The Year Lego Took Over the Internet – The Super Meme… which, in most humble of opinions doesn’t really do it justice – it’s not a super-meme, it’s simply one of the oldest and best memospheres that operates on the physical plane. Meccano was another one, but that appears for the moment to be somewhat off-radar.

One of the troubles I have with Reprap at the moment, is that it doesn’t seem to be much good for making anything other than reprap machines. I think the direction it needs to go in is to be able to create the building blocks for ANY sort of machine… similar to what Lego Mindstorms does… in fact combined with Arduinos, I think Reprap should be a direct competitor (or maybe symbiote) to lego mindstorms.

I know that the theory is that it can make anything… including itself (a rapid prototyper) but maybe it should make rapid prototypers that really are rapid… and for that, you kindof need a reduced-instruction-set style set of building blocks that massively lower the learning curve for participation.

So that’s my 2c.

And as a total non sequitur, here’s a video of another modular constructor thing made out of magnets.

or

and something else altogether.

The crab-router might even be a better platform for rep-rapping than the original rep-rapper. It could do scary things like wandering about finding its own fuel etc. I was thinking that it will be a while before it can make its own servos etc… but then I remembered the machine that someone made out of lego a year or two ago for solving Rubik’s Cubes… 

…so I looked it up on youtube and now there’s a whole sub-culture of Rubik’s cube solving machines

Which kindof makes me think that maybe someting that can make servos might not be so impossible afterall – just because I can’t imagine it, doesn’t mean someone else can’t. Here for example is something I hadn’t considered:

Robots that are basically single-cell creatures forming mult-cell organisms on their own.

There’s a talk here by Kevin Kelly talking about the evolution of technology – and with specific interest here is when he talks about technological evolution never dieing – the resurgence of Stirling Engines is an example of what can happen here. The technology is about 120 years old, and now they’re appearing all over the place.

What we’re seeing here is a new type of evolution.

Normal natural selection involves replicators blindly mutating and the best combinations surving to replicate again. The combination of the internet and a release of cognitive surplus (and open-source licensing models) means that every single replication/mutation can conceivably take place with the entire knowledge of everything that’s been tried and worked so far.

It’s a type of evolution that doesn’t happen in the dark. It’s still competitive but there’s a kind of modular over-arching consciousness that’s governing and driving it.