DARPA's Programmable Matter

[KarmaKiller]

Quote:

Even by the standards of the Pentagon fringe science arm, this project sounds far-out: “programmable matter” that can be ordered to “self-assemble or alter their shape, perform a function and then disassemble themselves.” But researchers backed by Darpa are actually making progress on this incredible goal, Henry Kenyon at Signal magazine reports.

One day, that could lead to “morphing aircraft and ground vehicles, uniforms that can alter themselves to be comfortable in any climate, and ’soft’ robots that flow like mercury through small openings to enter caves and bunker complexes.” A soldier could even reach into a can of unformed goop, and order up a custom-made tool or a “universal spare part.”

One team from Harvard is working on a kind of “generalized Rubik’s Cube” that can fold into all kinds of shapes. Another is trying to order large strands of synthetic DNA to bind together in a “molecular Velcro.” An MIT group is building “self-folding origami” machines that “use specialized sheets of material with built-in actuators and data. These machines use cutting-edge mathematical theorems to fold themselves into virtually any three-dimensional object.”

The Programmable Matter project is five months into its second phase, which is supposed to wind up early next Spring. When they’re done, the researchers ought to “assemble four or five three-dimensional solids of a specific size and shape from a set of building blocks.”

Intel, which has done a bunch of programmable matter work on its own, is looking beyond those basic steps. Way, way beyond. The malleable stuff could one day “mimic the shape and appearance of a person or object being imaged in real time, and as the originals moved, so would their replicas,” according to their website. “These 3D models would be physical entities, not holograms. You could touch them and interact with them, just as if the originals were in the room with you. ”

Source

I find this highly interesting, but scary at the same time. Anyone see the Terminator series coming to life?

[ShyguyXPC]

I remember reading something about this a year or two ago.

but in order to achieve what your talking about it will have to combine with several other technologies, ones like this

Face-morphing robot can look like anyone | DVICE

WD-2 Face Morphing Robot Could Be Anyone: Science Fiction in the News

not sure if thats even real, but everything I've found on it, seems to claim it is.

as it is, there has already been a shape changing functional robot developed, a large scale application of what is being talked about in the article you posted.

SquishBot Soft Shape-Changing Robot: Science Fiction in the News

YouTube - Shape changing robot

YouTube - Self-Replicating Repairing Robots (http://www.forofriki.com)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlXh8...eature=related (wonder if this is the chair the T-1000 would use? LOL, reminds me of the end of T2 when all his parts/globules merge back together to reform)


can you imagine these things on a smaller nano scale? (bunch of videos to look through) YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

[pullmyfoot]

Now that is scary

[ShyguyXPC]

combine all those technologies together, or at least aspects of each and

[Whir]

Nanoscale will be more realistic in the future if you ask me. It's easier to make things to your bidding when you can alter them at that scale. Tech may not be caught up to idea yet, but it will be at some point.