Towards A Universal Constructor
The UK’s Bath University houses a project known as ‘RepRap’, short for ‘Replicating Rapid-Prototyper’. Basically, the idea is to produce a machine that can duplicate itself (and other industrial products) and then give away the resulting device under the GNU public licence - in other words create a von Neumann Universal Constructor.
June 27th, 2006 at 9:26 am
I feel that the main milestone for a Von Neumann replicator is the understanding of space and CAD/CAM.
No doubt your replicator will be designed using CAD - everything is these days. If you could get a system that could put together a flatpack then you would be essentially there. As I said the problem is understanding space and Engineering Physics.
ProEngineer has a Jlink simulator, and I would suggest that you would start there.
My blog http://ipai.blogspot.com