MIT is Working on Self-Assembling Robots

We Met in the past at MIT with Neil Gershenfeld. 

MIT Is Working on Self-Assembling Robots

By Ryan Whitwam on November 28, 2022 at 7:00 am

Today, humans build robots, but in the future, robots could be programmed to build more of themselves. Researchers at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) have created robotic subunits called “voxels” that can self-assemble into a rudimentary robot, and then collect more voxels to assemble larger structures or even more robots.

The researchers, led by CBA Director Neil Gershenfeld, concede that we’re still years away from a true self-replicating robot, but the work with voxels is answering some vital questions that will help us get there. For one, the team has shown that it’s feasible to make the assembler bot and the structural components of whatever you’re building can be made of the same subunits — in this case, voxels.

Each robot consists of several voxels connected end-to-end. They use small but powerful magnets to latch onto additional subunits, which they can use to assemble new objects or make themselves larger. Eventually, a human operator might simply be able to tell these self-assembling robots what they want to be built, allowing the machines to figure out the specifics.

For example, if one robot isn’t enough to build the required structure, it can make a copy of itself from the same voxel components to split the work. When building something large, the robots could also decide to make themselves bigger and thus more efficient for the task. It could also be necessary for large robots to split into smaller ones for more detailed work.

The voxels (a term borrowed from 3D modeling) are based on components developed for previous MIT experiments. However, those voxels were simply structural pieces. The voxels used in the new research have been enhanced with the ability to share power and data when connected. The add-on voxel components don’t have any moving parts, though. All the movement and smarts come from the base units, which are like feet that allow the robot to inch along the magnet-studded substrate.  ... ' 

Designing Designs

Our one time connection point at MIT's Center of Bits and Atoms talks about design of designs.   And as he puts it 'Learning Representation'.   In the interim we can make things better by doing things faster,  making more of them, crowd sourcing solutions or by forcing some partial solution.  But the real learning is representation, or architecture ...  that can make things work.   - FAD

Morphogenesis for the Design of Design
A Talk By Neil Gershenfeld [7.31.19]

As we work on the self-reproducing assembler, and writing software that looks like hardware that respects geometry, they meet in morphogenesis. This is the thing I’m most excited about right now: the design of design. Your genome doesn’t store anywhere that you have five fingers. It stores a developmental program, and when you run it, you get five fingers. It’s one of the oldest parts of the genome. Hox genes are an example. It’s essentially the only part of the genome where the spatial order matters. It gets read off as a program, and the program never represents the physical thing it’s constructing. The morphogenes are a program that specifies morphogens that do things like climb gradients and symmetry break; it never represents the thing it’s constructing, but the morphogens then following the morphogenes give rise to you.

What’s going on in morphogenesis, in part, is compression. A billion bases can specify a trillion cells, but the more interesting thing that’s going on is almost anything you perturb in the genome is either inconsequential or fatal. The morphogenes are a curated search space where rearranging them is interesting—you go from gills to wings to flippers. The heart of success in machine learning, however you represent it, is function representation. The real progress in machine learning is learning representation. How you search hasn’t changed all that much, but how you represent search has.

These morphogenes are a beautiful way to represent design. Technology today doesn’t do it. Technology today generally doesn’t distinguish genotype and phenotype in the sense that you explicitly represent what you’re designing. In morphogenesis, you never represent the thing you’re designing; it's done in a beautifully abstract way. For these self-reproducing assemblers, what we’re building is morphogenesis for the design of design. Rather than a combinatorial search over billions of degrees of freedom, you search over these developmental programs. This is one of the core research questions we’re looking at. ..... "

NEIL GERSHENFELD is the director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms; founder of the global fab lab network; the author of FAB; and co-author (with Alan Gershenfeld & Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld) of Designing Reality. Neil Gershenfeld's Edge Bio Page

Tiny Motor Does Tasks, Create Subunits for Construction

We had talks with aneil Gershenfeld in the early days of 3D printing.   Like much the idea of such devices creating others.  Being 'subunits'  like amino acids.   See his books and related writing.

Tiny motor can “walk” to carry out tasks
Mobile motor could pave the way for robots to assemble complex structures — including other robots.   David L. Chandler | MIT News Office

Years ago, MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld had an audacious thought. Struck by the fact that all the world’s living things are built out of combinations of just 20 amino acids, he wondered: Might it be possible to create a kit of just 20 fundamental parts that could be used to assemble all of the different technological products in the world?

Gershenfeld and his students have been making steady progress in that direction ever since. Their latest achievement, presented this week at an international robotics conference, consists of a set of five tiny fundamental parts that can be assembled into a wide variety of functional devices, including a tiny “walking” motor that can move back and forth across a surface or turn the gears of a machine.

Previously, Gershenfeld and his students showed that structures assembled from many small, identical subunits can have numerous mechanical properties. Next, they demonstrated that a combination of rigid and flexible part types can be used to create morphing airplane wings, a longstanding goal in aerospace engineering. Their latest work adds components for movement and logic, and will be presented at the International Conference on Manipulation, Automation and Robotics at Small Scales (MARSS) in Helsinki, Finland, in a paper by Gershenfeld and MIT graduate student Will Langford.

Their work offers an alternative to today’s approaches to contructing robots, which largely fall into one of two types: custom machines that work well but are relatively expensive and inflexible, and reconfigurable ones that sacrifice performance for versatility. In the new approach, Langford came up with a set of five millimeter-scale components, all of which can be attached to each other by a standard connector. These parts include the previous rigid and flexible types, along with electromagnetic parts, a coil, and a magnet. In the future, the team plans to make these out of still smaller basic part types.  .... " 

Designing and Building Reality

Reminds us of our meeting with Neil Gershenfeld at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms ...  An enlightening experience about the future of fabrication. ...  Taking it beyond 3D Printing.  

In Knowledge@Wharton: Podcast and text.

We are on the threshold of a third digital revolution via computer fabrication, according to a new book.

Designing-RealityThe first two digital revolutions — computing and communications — transformed society. Now comes the third, which is fabrication, argues the new book, Designing Reality: How to Survive and Thrive in the Third Digital Revolution. The authors say that computerized fabrication such as 3-D printing is the beginning of a trend to change data into objects. But like any revolution, not all populations will benefit equally. The book, which is aimed at helping people prepare for the next tech wave, was written by three brothers: Alan Gershenfeld, president of E-Line Media and former chairman of Games for Change; Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, a professor at Brandeis University; and Neil Gershenfeld, who heads The Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT. Alan Gerhsenfeld and Cutcher-Gershenfeld talked about their book on the Knowledge@Wharton show, which airs on SiriusXM channel 111. (Listen to the full podcast using the player at the top of this page.)  .... " 

Gershenfeld Discusses Fab Labs

  Via CACM:  Neil Gershenfeld talks about Fab Labs.   We met him in the early establishment of the idea of the Center for Bits and Atoms.

In MIT News

" ... Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), launched the Fab Lab a decade ago. Since then, hundreds of Fab Labs have been installed in dozens of countries. In an interview, Gershenfeld discusses the growth and impact of this outreach project.

He notes the CBA runs a digital fabrication research facility, which contains tools worth millions of dollars, with a research roadmap leading up to a Star Trek-style replicator.

The facility was created with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, and Fab Labs began as a modest project for the agency to expand access to these capabilities.

A Fab Lab today includes three-dimensional scanning and printing, large-format and precision machining, computer-controlled lasers and knives, surface-mount electronics production, embedded programming, and computing tools for design and collaboration. ... " 

Gershenfeld on a New Digital Reality

Interesting Edge conversation with Neil Gershenfeld of MIT.  We connected with him there a number of times in the early days of remote manufacture.  That world is starting to mature.   " ... ...Today, you can send a design to a fab lab and you need ten different machines to turn the data into something. Twenty years from now, all of that will be in one machine that fits in your pocket. This is the sense in which it doesn't matter. You can do it today. How it works today isn't how it's going to work in the future but you don't need to wait twenty years for it. Anybody can make almost anything almost anywhere.  ... " 

Synthetic Biology Conference

In the NYT:  A topic we linked with the Santa Fe Institute on.  Also with MIT prof Neil Gershenfeld, who is quoted in the article.   "  Neil Gershenfeld,   ... a physicist who is the director of the Center for Bits and Atoms, said that the improvement in the capacity to read and write biological genes has given rise to the possibility of “spectacular advances,” like the ability to use a computer to design a complete genome, output it, insert it in a cell and in effect create life from scratch.

The new abilities, he noted, raised ethical questions that are as yet unanswered. “When the ability to convert biology to data and data into biology becomes that cheap, that agile, that easy to do, what are the consequences?” he said. ... " 

We saw this as more directional for modeling capabilities, based on biological examples, rather than about creating life.  Often using agent models inspired by biology and even swarms of animals.

Rise of the Replicators

We met MIT's Neil Gershenfeld and read his book: When Things Start to Think. Much enjoyed, but I did wonder about how hard it would be to implement what he was suggesting. Remote manufacturing perhaps, but machine replication? Here is a New Scientist article that discusses progress in this area. A true rise of the replicators? The implications?

3D Printing to Remote Manufacturing

The idea of 3D Printing has always been intriguing. You have a 3D specification of an object and then a device carves out a model of it anywhere you have such a printer. Its been possible for a long time, first with massive NC machines, later with very expensive floor models, now with desktop devices with a very small footprint that cost about $5K. It points to Neil Gershenfeld's concept of Personal Fabrication covered in his FAB book, ultimately a means of remote manufacturing, a kind of teleportation where you only need the raw materials at a remote site. Well, no, not for some time to come. The kind of 3D printing done here is only a means of cutting an external plastic model of some shell of an object. Useful for the outside form of a small bottle or package design, to see how it looks on a shelf. Still very specialized and simplistic applications, but a hint at what may be possible.

Gershenfeld's FAB

I finally finished Gershenfeld's FAB, enjoyed it, I have posted a longer overview and review over at Future Now.

Gershenfeld's FAB

Have not read Gershenfeld's FAB book yet, but its on the list. His previous popular books were thought-provoking, and his modeling texts are well worth taking a look at.