#smart sand

Smart sand & robot pebbles (by MITNewsOffice)

Self-sculpting sand - MIT News, April 2, 2012:

Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool. A few seconds later, you reach into the box and pull out a full-size footstool: The sand has assembled itself into a large-scale replica of the model. That may sound like a scene from a Harry Potter novel, but it's the vision animating a research project at the Distributed Robotics Laboratory (DRL) at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Unlike many other approaches to reconfigurable robots, smart sand uses a subtractive method, akin to stone carving, rather than an additive method, akin to snapping LEGO blocks together. A heap of smart sand would be analogous to the rough block of stone that a sculptor begins with. The individual grains would pass messages back and forth and selectively attach to each other to form a three-dimensional object; the grains not necessary to build that object would simply fall away. When the object had served its purpose, it would be returned to the heap. Its constituent grains would detach from each other, becoming free to participate in the formation of a new shape.

Smart sand & robot pebbles

It sounds like something out of a fantasy film: a vat of sand into which you plunge a small object only to watch the sand bind together to form larger copies of the same object. Such “smart sand” isn’t exactly a reality just yet, but a team at MIT’s Distributed Robotics Laboratory (DRL) has a vision for tiny granules--“smart pebbles”--imbued with a small amount of computing power and covered in magnets on the outside. Piled together in a heap, the small amount of computing power in each grain would become a single distributed computing platform capable of shaping itself into objects, with the unneeded grains falling away to leave behind the finished product. [...]