GENOMICON

Tiny cogs being turned by bacteria.

as in An individual bacterium’s motion appears random. However, at a concentration of about 10 billion bacterial cells per cubic centimeter, the organisms begin to swim together in what the researchers described as “self-organized, large-scale vortices.” It’s that collective motion that powers the gears’ movement. In their experiments, the motion petered out if the concentration was increased to anything beyond 40 billion bacteria per cubic centimeter, as the organisms appear to shift their behavior toward creating biofilms.

Which is fairly incredible really.

It reminds me a bit of the (very ) early computers though – they were originally set up to create logarithmic/mathematical tables – which had some sort of military application if memory serves. It was only later that it was realised that the computers could perform the calculations themselves… and that they could cut out the middle-man – ie: the logarithmic tables.

Similarly with nanotech I suspect. Microbes already are tiny little machines that can do all sorts of incredibly useful stuff – so using them to create bigger little machines is a bit daft. If you want to use nanotech to build something – a chemical, or a body part or whatever – it might be easiest to cut out the middle-man and just getting microbes to do it directly by tinkering with their genes.

I think the nanotech thing might be a bit misunderstood actually – there seems to be this expectation that we’re going to have tiny little monsters that can eat steel and replace cut-off arms from materials stolen from the side of a passing train etc… but have you seen robots trying to walk recently? Not bad. Not good. We’ve got a looooooong way to go before we can get a machine to self-power, let alone self-replicate.

And bugs can already do it. I’d be putting my money on the biotech revolution really kicking in big-time well before the anticipated nanotech revolution… and the nanotech revolution is actually part of a materials revolution that’s already well underway.

So that’s what I would have thought.

Ok, I made that up. In actual fact you swallow it, and it swims around inside you, doing all sorts of medical robot stuff

How cool is that? It has tiny little propellers etc. Looks like it’s 3D printed as well.

There are a load of medical robots over at New Scientist, and they all look slightly scary if you ask me – though possibly less so than someone wearing a mask and wielding a scalpel.

That green one at the end was particularly scary. These people don’t really get androidal xenophobia. Making something look a bit human is worse than leaving it as a machine. If you want people to relate to it as though it’s a… “being” then give it eyes that blink, and follow things about, eg:

It’s really not that hard I don’t think… if you’re smart enough to make a robot to pick someone up – which of course I’m not, so what do I know etc.

Human powers of anthropomorphism are unstoppably powerful. As Bruce Stirling said about some laser-projected smart-seeming tadpole creatures… no one looked up. Even when it was pointed out that these things were being projected from the ceiling people went “oh yea”, then went back to looking at them as though they were real creatures.

And we like them. We just can’t deal with them looking like weird mask-wearing psycho-clowns.

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Solar-powered and self-motile… a cross between a bristlebot and a beambot… and a chocolate-teapot I suspect, but it’s a journey, not a destination afterall.

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I believe virtually everything I read, and I think that is what makes me more of a selective human than someone who doesn’t believe anything… but until I’ve seen a video of this thing flying…

The point though is though, that it’s using memory-metal for the muscles – pass a current through it and it moves. I can remember reading about this stuff in OMNI magazine in the 70s… and thought the future had finally arrived (actually, it was only just being invented), but nothing much seems to have happened with it since. I think that finding robot muscles other than magnetic-induction type motors is fairly fundamental in moving things forward into proper sci-fi land though.

I’m not entirely convinced about this fluttery business. I think the reasons moths and bats and whatnot have wings rather than propellers is more a case of evolution designing around a physical weakness in multi-cell systems than one being more efficient than the other… I mean, which looks more stable to you, this:

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or this

?

Ok – about the same, but the flapping to me looks like a it’s basically two propellers doing two back and forth semi-circles rather than a full rotation… and I suspect very strongly that the reason it’s filmed in slo-mo is that at normal speeds, they only managed to get seconds of stable flight at a time. There are a lot of flutterbots on youtube, and they look as erratic as hell.

I suspect that stability basically comes down to smarts… as you’ll know if you’ve ever watched wasps raiding bee-hives… bees bumble about and crash all over the place* while wasps can zoom straight through really narrow gaps – and they’re basically the same hardware.

Still… tiny muscles are to robots what light-gates are to computers. Maybe.

–

* Christ on a bike, how much time must people have on their hands to dub a scream over a bee crash?

Here’s some insane person’s fantasy about using robotic bugs to spy on and kill people. The voice-over is flirting with that whole hollywood macho tone – an indication that they’re living in movie-land rather than the real world. Just like Ronald Reagan – who had an alarming habit of telling anecdotes about his life which were actually from movies, and they named a battleship after him. I’m talking about The US Air Force.

Some other people, equally demented have seen Terminator and instead of trying to kill off the inventor of Skynet before he managed to do any damage, they’ve set up a thing where AI systems can compete with each other to see who’s best at killing off the human race.

So anyway, robotic insects. Marvelous. I followed all the links from the BotJunkie post above, and spent a morning perusing for others etc…

It flies, it crawls, it gives me the creeps. It’s got that whole scrabbly bat-bug vibe going on.

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Then there’s this one:

The The DelFly Micro, (from), with photo/vid of it’s older sibling here.

Another, prettier one here…

So what do these all have in common.

1) they’re all little flying robots that look a bit like bugs
2) they all employ first-personism
3) they’re all evil. Either for spying or killing people – apart from the last one maybe. Or any of the other ones.

4) they’re all a bit rubbish.

I mean no offence etc, they’re a lot better than I could do – I can barely tie my shoelaces, but if you compare them to an actual insect… they’re crap. Take a proper hornet for example. It can :

• fly : really accurately. Straight through holes the same size that it is without hesitation.
• walk : like the clappers, up walls, upside down on the ceiling, all limbs individually sensored and controlled.
• see / smell / feel / hear / taste? and god knows what else
• fight.
• cope with being waterlogged.
• 3D print using locally sourced materials (their nests are 3d printed)
• self-fuel using locally sourced materials.
• reproduce itself from locally sourced materials, with sexual selection and variation so evolution happens.
• work/live/fight/build communally.

Now that, my friends is quite a feat of engineering. Think of the best flying machine we have today… a stealth bomber? It doesn’t come close to what a simple wasp can achieve.

So I’m guessing that we’re going to learn to make “brains” that learn how to use alien systems faster than we’re going to learn how to build robots that actually manage to do what mad-scientists want them to. I’m guessing that the biotech revolution is going to merge with and eclipse all the others – robotics, nanotech etc… they’re not going to be like they are in sci-fi movies because it’s easier (and a lot more potent) to program/adapt existing creatures than it is to make them from scratch.

It’s a question of interface… and there have been movements in that direction of late. Rat brains controlling robots, synthetic cells making electronics, protein making cell machinery etc etc. There was a talk on TED a couple of years ago where someone had programmed a machine to “learn how to walk”…

…to be honest, I can’t see any other approach working as system complexity increases. Genetic Algorithms etc.

Make a hardware problem a software problem. That’s my advice. Machines that learn. Then we’re really in trouble.

I’ve got this theory that every stupid idea is a great idea waiting to happen – all it takes is a different perspective.

So it is with bristlebots - I’ve touched on this before with the thing where the bristlebot turned into a possible engine for a space elevator.

Well another one’s turned up. Making a tiny bristlebot to deliver drugs to tumours.

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It’s about 1mm wide by 1cm long and is powered with an external vibrating magnetic field. Apparently there’s plans to mount a camera on it, which is something I went on about before, and everyone thought I was mad etc. Microbial Safari.

Of course this particular robot is a direct nick from nature – foxtails which (in NZ at least) are the bane of dog owner’s lives because they get stuck between their toes, and like these robots, can only go in one direction – deeper.

Nasty little shits they are. Quite intriguing to play with though – they’re actually covered in micro-barbs to accentuate the affect. Kindof like one-way velcro.

“Made of glass, each has a spherical head 200 to 300 nanometres across and a corkscrew-shaped tail 1 to 2 micrometres long – less than one-tenth the length of a human sperm. To make their propellers, Ghosh and Fischer covered a silicon wafer with glass beads, before depositing a vapour of silicon dioxide onto them.” - New Scientist

I think one of the things that’s quite interesting about this is that they’re propelled (to a fairly fine degree of accuracy) using magnetic-fields… force-fields in other words. Just like the ones off The Death Star.

That’s one of the things that wasn’t immediately apparent from watching Star-Wars – Darth Vader was only a couple of nanometers high, and The Death Star was the size of a pea. It was a serious business though.

It’ll be interesting when we manage to shrink ICs/Optics down to microscopic level – and incorporate first-personism into nano-bots. We’ll be able to go on bacterial safaris. I think that’s one of the most interesting things about first-personism: the ability to shed size-constraints – and detach ourselves from the otherwise serious consequences of getting into a fight with an amoeba 100x our size.

Tiny Motor

From a cellphone I think. I found one about this size in a broken CD player recently.

Bristlebot Inchworm with Biometal

This metal was all the rage back in the 70s – I can remember reading magazines filled with pictures of Luke Skywalker… raving about this new wonder-metal that could remember its shape. 20-30 years later… inchbot. Still, it’s a good inchbot.

I love the comments on this one:
ROFLMAO sexy time!!
nice bot, how do u make their “brain”?
how can they get-by by themselves?

a proper microbot

“A gold/nickel microrobot of 300x300x70 micrometer (10^-6 m) dashing through a maze of photoresist walls.
The robot is controlled by visual servoing, i.e. the user clicks a spot and the computer steers it there.

For more information see other videos and comments, our webpage (http://www.iris.ethz.ch/msrl/research/s pecial/nanogram/) or Google it.”

Little Baby Tanklet

Philips Research in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, has developed a prototype for a pill that can be programmed to navigate toward a specific trouble spot in the body and deposit its medicine there, radioing dispatches to the doctor as it travels.
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