Claytronics: highly scalable communications, sensing, and actuation networks

We propose a demonstration of extremely scalable modular robotics algorithms developed as part of the Claytronics Project (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~claytronics/), as well as a demonstration of proof-of-concept prototypes. Our effort envisions multi-million-module robot ensembles able to morph into three-dimensional scenes, eventually with sufficient fidelity so as to convince a human observer the scenes are real. Although this work is potentially revolutionary in the sense that it holds out the possibility of radically altering the relationship between computation, humans, and the physical world, many of the research questions involved are similar in flavor to more mainstream systems research, albeit larger in scale. For instance, as in sensor networks, each robot will incorporate sensing, computation, and communications components. However, unlike most sensor networks each robot will also include mechanisms for actuation and motion. Many of the key challenges in this project involve coordination and communication of sensing and actuation across such large ensembles of independent units.