[Tyler]

DARPA Programmable Matter Milestone
     


DARPA
announced a minor milestone (PDF format) in their effort to develop
programmable
matter, something they've been working on for a while, probably
since the liquid metal Terminator robot hit the big screen. In their
words, what they want is:
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 that 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.
Pictured above are sample shapes formed by MIT's millimeter-scale
autonomous
microsystem particles. For more see the websites of the individual
teams, characterized in the
DARPA report as follows: George
Whiteside's Harvard team (generalized Rubik’s Cube matter self
assembly), David R. Liu’s Harvard
team (molecular Velcro), Daniela
Rus's MIT team (computational origami), Neil Gershenfeld’s MIT team
(milli-biology), and Hod Lipson’s
Cornell team (enzyme-mimetic building blocks).

   

http://robots.net/article/2809.html