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Robot Made of Ice Can Repair and Rebuild Itself
- macinjosh 6y agoFreethink is a great subscribe on YouTube. I highly recommend it. https://www.youtube.com/user/freethinkmedia https://www.youtube.com/user/freethinkmedia
- robotresearcher 6y agoNarrator: it can’t. This is very interesting and imaginative work from a great group but the headline is not justified by the story yet.
- raldi 6y agoMods, headline suggestion: Robot made with ice; goal is to make one that can repair itself
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- OpticalWindows 6y agoAbominable Icerobot: an attempt
- suitcaseman2 6y agoRobot with structure and wheels made of ice accepted in IROS and why
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- petermcneeley 6y agoint main() { return printf("I think therefore I am." ); } // self_aware_robot.cpp
- sixsevenwheels1 6y agoSnow Goons https://calvinandhobbes.fandom.com/wiki/Snow_Goons https://calvinandhobbes.fandom.com/wiki/Snow_Goons
- gbpz 6y agoSorta related, where can one find some of the latest research into self repairing machines?
- robotresearcher 6y agoCheck the references in original paper linked from the article: http://ras.papercept.net/images/temp/IROS/files/2114.pdf http://ras.papercept.net/images/temp/IROS/files/2114.pdf Yim (senior author) has been doing modular robot work since the 90s. (I’m not Yim but have followed his work since his PhD project Polypod circa ~2003.)
- LadyCailin 6y agoStargate SG-1 is a great documentary on the topic.
- faeyanpiraat 6y agoThose pesky little buggers..
- fredley 6y agoSo a cold T1000?
- idclip 6y agoWhat a sad yet accurate homage to being human.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoDoes it introduce itself with “Hi, I’m Olaf and I love warm hugs”?
- ilammy 6y agoThis reminded me about Kovrigin's chronicles, a story by Vadim Shefner that I read as a kid. It's somewhat musing on the soviet research atmosphere and all, but the background there was that a man invented a way to turn water into a special sort of ice which could be used as a universal unbreakable material, with a bold idea of building cities under the ocean because there is so much space on our planet.
- plutonic 6y agoThey should have used pykrete :) [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete
- qPM9l3XJrF 6y agoInteresting! I wonder if drones could construct artificial glaciers out of this to halt global warming?
- faeyanpiraat 6y agoI’m not sure if you are joking or not.
- qPM9l3XJrF 6y agoNot joking. I like the dream big, what can I say :) More specifically, imagine ships sailing around the Arctic circle just before the water freezes in winter, dropping sawdust (or newspaper for "super Pykrete") in their wake. Since sawdust comes from trees, it's sequestered carbon. Once you put it in the water, it's not going to burn down and release its carbon like a tree in Australia or California might. Since it floats, it should stay near the top of the water until the water freezes. Pack ice with sawdust frozen in it will last longer and reflect the sun's light back for a longer period of the year. There's a risk of the albedo being affected negatively--perhaps using light-colored wood for the sawdust would help with this. Hopefully, even after the Pykrete melted, the sawdust would stay in the ocean near the surface, and re-freeze next year so you get Pykrete every year. (A potential downside here is that the sawdust could be difficult to remove if we ever realized this plan was backfiring somehow. Maybe we'd prefer some sort of sawdust which eventually sinks for that reason.) Another idea is to bioengineer some kind of organism which reproduces in the Arctic ocean and changes the consistency of the water so that when it freezes it behaves more like Pykrete. Perhaps some kind of algal bloom (apparently you can trigger algal blooms by seeding water with iron?) To be safe, before releasing this organism into the environment, we could bioengineer some other organism which feeds on this and nothing else, so we have a way to reverse the experiment if it goes wrong. Hey, I don't think it is much more harebrained than other geoengineering ideas I have seen floated :)