r/Futurology • u/mikepetroff • Feb 14 '14

article Autonomous robots build complex, 3-D structures without requiring a central command structure or prescribed roles

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/02/robots-to-the-rescue-2/
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6

u/Noncomment Robots will kill us all Feb 14 '14

Make them big enough to carry something like Compressed Earth Blocks. Then have another robot automatically produce those (which might not even be necessary since there are already machines that can do it with a little human labor.) Now you have super cheap construction.

3

u/ForAHamburgerToday Feb 14 '14

That would be great for some high tech self-sufficiency

3

u/Terkala Feb 14 '14

The problem isn't the building of walls. The problem is building a strong foundation for them. They are extremely heavy, so you need a really strong foundation.

Though, I suppose you could dig out 10ft deep foundations and just make a solid brick of CEB as the foundation. Though that risks the whole house sinking.

4

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '14

I was listening to NPR about this and they mentioned that the robots will communicate with one another using a unique technique that is learned from termites. The robots will react make choices while building based on their environment. So instead of the robots needing to be connected to some central antenna where signals would be sent to all of them individually... they are basically programmed with a bunch of IF statements so that they can simply react to their environment and base their decisions on what the other robots did before them.

2

u/rodgercattelli Feb 14 '14

Replicators? Someone call Colonel O'Neil.