MIT Researchers Envision Smart Sand that Could Produce Nearly Any Object on Demand

Posted on April 2, 2012

MIT researchers envision smart sand, which could enable anyone with strict weight or size constraints to produce almost any object on demand. MIT says in a release, "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."

Here is another description of smart sand from MIT: "Given a bag of Smart Sand, the user conveys the desired object to the modules and then begin shaking the bag. As the modules in the bag come into contact and exchange information, they decide when to bond with their neighbors. After this selective bonding process, the user opens the bag, grabs the object, brushes off the extra material, and can then use the object for the task at hand. When the user is done with the object, he places it back in the bag where it disintegrates so that the modules can be reused indefinitely."

At the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in May, researchers will present a paper describing algorithms that could ultimately enable the smart sand. The researchers have also created Robot Pebbles as a step toward the goal of smart sand. Each Robot Pebble is a 12mm cube capable of autonomously communicating with and latching to four neighboring cubes in the same plane to form 2D structures.

Unlike many other approaches to reconfigurable robots, smart sand uses a subtractive method rather than an additive method. Individual grains in a heap of smart sand would pass messages back and forth and selectively attach to each other in order to form the desired three-dimensional object. Any grains not required to build the object would simply fall away. When the object had served its purpose, it could be returned to the heap. Its constituent grains would detach from each other, becoming free to participate in the formation of a new object.

This video explains how the smart sand algorithm works. Take a look:

Robert Wood, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University, says making smart sand, with grains much smaller than the 10-millimeters cube, is not an insurmountable obstacle. Wood says, "Take the core functionalities of their pebbles. They have the ability to latch onto their neighbors; they have the ability to talk to their neighbors; they have the ability to do some computation. Those are all things that are certainly feasible to think about doing in smaller packages. It would take quite a lot of engineering to do that, of course. That's a well-posed but very difficult set of engineering challenges that they could continue to address in the future."


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