I said it was possible, people laughed. I said that one day we would have transformers working for our government. They said I was crazy. Well you know what? The pentagon has made us one step closer to this.
This article claims that reaserachers at the pentagon teamed up with a Harvard university research team and have designed a robot that although it is only about a millimeter thick, it has the ablity to fold itself into different shapes. It looks a bit like a self folding origami.
It looks like a crinkled piece of foil, but it is actually small sets of tiles that are
connected with 25 acctuators and a special set of flexible electronics.
According to Robert Wood, the head of the Harvard research team said that the effect is achieved by setting off the actuaters in sequence to get it to fold into specific patterns.
The sequence is done by a set of two algorithms. The first analyzes the 3d shape of what it is to become, and the second reverse engineers its shape to map out the correct folds.
The interesting part is that the final hope for this it to be able to give a soldier a can, and they empty it, and tell it to tansform into whatever shape they need that material they need it to be. Such as tempature shifting clothes or self changing airplanes that become more aerodynamic in the air.
Personaly that reminds me of the T-X from the terminator movies and that thing was scary.
Right now it can only change into two different shapes, but the potential is obviously there. However, I don't think we will see this come to any usefulness anytime soon. But I can not say how far along their research has gotten.
The thing could be able to duplicate something from Satoshi Kamiya for all I know. This could be a very interesting product.
For links to other articles I've written
http://rlwoodsiii.blogspot.com/For the original article about it
http://io9.com/5574826/programmable-shee...