DARPA is all happy today. They announced a minor milestone in their effort to develop programmable matter, something they’ve been working on for a while, dreaming of a liquid metal Terminator that they can control. Control for a little while at least. They want:

A material that can perform several operations in sequence: upon activation by an external signal, decode and propagate instructions; translate information into action, transport particles and assemble shapes; interlock particles to form an object; perform error-checking and encode final state information, again activated by external signal; and disassemble into the starting material.

The milestone is this. Each of the five university groups working on the problem have confirmed a theoretical approach as viable and developed mathematical models critical for the next phase of research. The pictures above are sample shapes formed by MIT’s millimeter-scale autonomous microsystem particles.

[Robots.net]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 11:39 am and is filed under Research. Be sure to subscribe to the Botropolis.com feed because it is really, really awesome. Have something you want to share? Please let us know.

Leave a Reply