OK, hold everything – and take the three short minutes required to watch this video of a modular robot reassembling itself after being kicked apart:
There’s a hundred science fictional thoughts in my head right now – one of which is the twinge of guilt I felt when they kicked the thing in the first place.
What was the first thing that flashed into your head when you were watching that video? [Tip o’ the bowler to m1k3y the grinder – cheers, man!]
what immediately went through my mind was an image of a severed robotic arm (not unlike the prosthesis pictured a few posts down, only meaner-looking) dragging itself across a room, locating its other body parts in order to reassemble itself and continue killing.
my second thought was to wonder why C3PO was never able to do that when he got blown apart in Empire Strikes Back.
First time I saw polybots I thought of two movies: http://blog.rebang.com/?p=90
…Terminator’s ‘liquid metal’ 🙂
That’s cool, but its at the end, after that labourious reconstruction, when the robot stands up proud and rebuilt then promptly falls apart again and the engineers/scientists collapse into a fit of giggles that you can’t help thinking mankind might still have a decade or two at the top of the heap yet…
Terminator, i double that… 🙂
I’m happy to see Yim got his robot working so well. I spent some time working with him at Upenn for grad school, and he was having many short commings. He envisions the robot being capable of flying a plane or piloting an automobile!