Building millimeter sized robots w/Professor Julien Bourgeois

Julien Bourgeois talks about self-reconfiguring modular robotics and how he is developing millimeter sized robots called Claytronics.

Julien started out as a computer scientist. He was always interested in robotics privately but then had the opportunity to get into micro robots when his lab was merged into the FEMTO-ST Institute. He later worked with Seth Copen Goldstein at Carnegie Mellon on the Claytronics project.

He tells us how he works on creating a world built with programmable material that would allow objects to change their form and function automatically by running a program. This will create smart objects that can adapt to the world around them and user preference in a totally new way.

One large benefit of programmable matter is that development can happen both in the computer and in the real world with changes transferred between them. A change done in the code would appear in the part made up of programmable matter, but the part can also be changed in the real world and the change would be transferred to the program controlling it. This would create a very flexible, dynamic and highly intuitive design process.

The structures based on programmable matter also exhibit many very special characteristics. They can be self-healing if they get damaged, they can dynamically respond to load and be as strong as needed, they can degrade gracefully and predictably and can even indicate that they are overloaded and might fail so that the user can take the appropriate actions.

We also learn about a system for sorting very small components he built and how cameras could not be applied.

Per and Julien discuss how developing programmable material is hard and that many difficult problems have to be overcome. At the same time, many problems with the current way of doing things will be solved in a fundamentally better way by systems built with
programmable matter.

Julien shows an enlarged mock-up of the small robots that make up programmable matter, catoms, and speaks about how they are designed. Currently he is working on a unit that is one centimeter in diameter and he shows us the very small CPU that goes into that model.

There is also an art project in progress, using another version of programmable material building blocks.

More about the small CPUs mentioned at https://www.cubeworks.io This episode was recorded at ICML, IJCAI-ECAI, AAMAS in Stockholm, Sweden 2018.

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