BBC News - Self-sculpting sand robots are under development at MIT

Tiny robots that can join together to form functional tools and then split apart again after use might be ready for market in little more than a decade, according to researchers.

A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says it has developed about 30 prototype "smart pebbles" and the software to run them. Each processor can currently store 32 kilobytes of code and has only two kilobytes of working memory - so the algorithm powering the process had to be kept simple. "The idea is that they sense the border of the original shape - if a module detects it doesn't have a neighbour, it assumes it may be on the border of the shape," Mr Gilpin explained.


"But in 10 years you might see a product on the market that starts to rival traditional manufacturing approaches. I think we might all be surprised at how quickly this advances once people really start looking at the technology."

More details of the project will be presented to the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in St Paul, Minnesota next month.


Source: BBC News - Self-sculpting sand robots are under development at MIT