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.” Outlining what this might actually look like, should the Distributed Robotics Lab succeed at implementing their vision, ScienceDaily suggests you “imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool. Its constituent grains would detach from each other, becoming free to participate in the formation of a new shape.
When the object had served its purpose, it would be returned to the heap. The individual grains would pass messages back and forth and selectively attach to each other to form a three-dimensional object the grains not necessary to build that object would simply fall away.
Researchers at MIT’s Distributed Robotics Laboratory is working on so-called “ smart sand,” which would allow for the “spontaneous formation of new tools or duplication of broken mechanical parts.” Current prototypes of the substance-essentially, large cubes, seen in the photograph above-operate by way of “rudimentary microprocessors inside and very unusual magnets” on their edges, as ScienceDaily explains.Ī heap of smart sand would be analogous to the rough block of stone that a sculptor begins with.
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