Julien Bourgeois talks about self-reconfiguring modular robotics and
how he is developing millimeter sized robots called Claytronics. Host
Per Sjöborg, Robots in Depth #52 supported by https://carbon.ai &
http://www.aptomica.com.
Julien started out as a computer scientist. He was always interested
in robotics privately but then had the opportunity to get into micro
robots when his lab was merged into the FEMTO-ST Institute. He later
worked with Seth Copen Goldstein at Carnegie Mellon on the Claytronics
project.
He tells us how he works on creating a world built with programmable
material that would allow objects to change their form and function
automatically by running a program. This will create smart objects
that can adapt to the world around them and user preference in a
totally new way.
One large benefit of programmable matter is that development can
happen both in the computer and in the real world with changes
transferred between them. A change done in the code would appear in
the part made up of programmable matter, but the part can also be
changed in the real world and the change would be transferred to the
program controlling it. This would create a very flexible, dynamic and
highly intuitive design process.
The structures based on programmable matter also exhibit many very
special characteristics. They can be self-healing if they get damaged,
they can dynamically respond to load and be as strong as needed, they
can degrade gracefully and predictably and can even indicate that they
are overloaded and might fail so that the user can take the
appropriate actions.
We also learn about a system for sorting very small components he
built and how cameras could not be applied.
Per and Julien discuss how developing programmable material is hard
and that many difficult problems have to be overcome. At the same
time, many problems with the current way of doing things will be
solved in a fundamentally better way by systems built with
programmable matter.
Julien shows an enlarged mock-up of the small robots that make up
programmable matter, catoms, and speaks about how they are designed.
Currently he is working on a unit that is one centimeter in diameter
and he shows us the very small CPU that goes into that model.
There is also an art project in progress, using another version of
programmable material building blocks.
More about the small CPUs mentioned at https://www.cubeworks.io
This episode was recorded at ICML, IJCAI-ECAI, AAMAS in Stockholm, Sweden 2018.
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The host Per Sjöborg on http://www.flexibilityenvelope.com
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