Custom toolkit of the future
The world offers a wild number of tools to the modern tinkerer. Yet the perfect tool never seems to be within arm’s reach, or available at all. The angle of the handle is off, the fitting imprecise, or the size awkward. How convenient it would be if we could fashion our own adaptation from clay, or styrofoam, or duct tape, throw it in a bag of sand, and pull out a solid, working version. That future is here . . . or nearly so. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Distributed Robotics Laboratory, Cambridge, MA, have devised a self-sculpting sand that will duplicate whatever object is thrown at it, or into it. Each grain (or module) is a cube filled with processors and electropermanent magnets. The cubes do not fidget about to assemble themselves into whatever new shape is demanded of them; individual mobility would add an entirely different engineering headache. Rather, they start as a latticed block, and then learn from their neighbours the shape of any object placed amidst them. They pass along messages as to which ones should stay together and which should fall away. It’s more akin to a sculptor “removing the excess material, to reveal the shape that’s always been underneath,” says Kyle Gilpin, a graduate student at the lab who led the project. A previous edition of the module measured 1.7 in per size. The current version is 12 mm. Shrinking them meant losing room for connectors, so at the moment they only work in two dimensions. “In the long run we would like a module approaching a millimetre in size,” says Gilpin “You can create objects with much higher resolutions.” Smaller means stronger as well. Where a single module of the 1.7-in version could support a chain of 17 additional modules, […]