Cool Technology of the Week | JBKnowledge | Self-Assembling Structures
Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 6:25AM Not only does MIT researcher Skylar Tibbits have an awesome name, he also has an awesome vision, shared this past September at TED. He points out that while skyscrapers take an average of 2.5 years to complete, DNA can replicate rougly 3 billion base pairs in about an hour. Skylar believes the future is in our learning to manufacture such replication and self-guidance, so instead of building things, like DNA, we let them build themselves.
"There’s new possibilities for self-assembly, replication, repair in our physical structures, our buildings, machines. … Imagine if our buildings, our bridges, machines, all of our bricks could actually compute."
He explains that by decoding the complexity of our assembly processes, learning to program those sequences into materials, linking this system to an energy source for continuous operation, and having a feedback system for error detection - we can create materials that construct themselves. In the video at the link below, he even shows some of the reconfigurable, programmable robots they've already managed to have do just that.
His explanation of gates and sequencing may make your brain hurt, but the implications of "self-assembly" are staggering to think about...
Click here to learn more about this self-assembling technology
