I've always wanted to wire up one of the DARPA Grand Challenge
autonomous vehicles to Google Maps and then to service locaters like
this. The Austin Robot Group's very own Bruce Waters suggested a CNC
router built into a car, since a car could be controlled in a specific
enough way to make patterns and so on with a very large momentum
already accessible and so on. If Bruce goes ahead with that sort of
project, it would be interesting to conduct miniature experiments to
show how all of these different structures can interpolate
automatically -- perhaps not with driving at this point, but simple
demonstrations showing how metadata formats to describe what something
is, and then how to get it (Google Maps and their path finder solution
engine) (or maybe just HTTP sometimes, like is already occuring) would
be a good start. Didn't people used to leave milk cartons out on their
front porch? "Milk bot" would have been a natural development, except
we stopped doing that for some reason. Would have been a good example.
- Bryan
________________________________________
http://heybryan.org/
Engineers: http://heybryan.org/exp.html
irc.freenode.net #hplusroadmap
DARPA Grand Challenge vehicles are in the millions of dollars range.
> the two, the freeconomy map and driverless technology with a solar
> power / hydrogen powered (fueled by water collected in transit). If
> the vehicle can drive in traffic it can easy pickup and dropoff
> items... Then give the vehicle an ability to assemble the parts...
>
> So, let's call it, 'The Grand Freeconomy Challenge'. The challenge
> will be to build an autonomous vehicle / fab lab that goes from place
> to place picking up parts for free from various areas and fully
> assembling another duplicate of itself.
The Replication Challenge already exists. ;-)
von Neumann Universal Constructor Prize
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/vncprize
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~douglasr/prize/
http://constructors.wikidot.com/
Anybody interested in replication needs to know the immediate difference
between Freitas' proposal of closure engineering for self-replication
versus the RepRap strategy. I wrote an email earlier this month about
this, which I'm copying/pasting below.
On Thursday 28 August 2008, "Charlie Manion" <cam...@gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
There's some good names behind that server too.
http://www.islandone.org/
Artemis Society, the Dysons, Project Atlantis/Oceania, Hans Moravec,
etc. Actually, all of them.
I'm wondering who came up with this one:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/fig5-16.gif
mentioned at: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASM53.html#533
Parts closure in theoretical self-replication studies:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASM53.html#536
> Fundamental to the problem of designing self-replicating systems is
> the issue of closure.
>
> In its broadest sense, this issue reduces to the following question:
> Does system function (e.g., factory output) equal or exceed system
> structure (e.g., factory components or input needs)? If the answer is
> negative, the system cannot independently fully replicate itself; if
> positive, such replication may be possible.
>
> Consider, for example, the problem of parts closure. Imagine that the
> entire factory and all of its machines are broken down into their
> component parts. If the original factory cannot fabricate every one
> of these items, then parts closure does not exist and the system is
> not fully self-replicating .
I think that's a good way of saying it too.
> Partial closure results in a system which is only partially
> self-replicating. Some vital matter, energy, or information must be
> provided from the outside or the machine system will fail to
> reproduce.
But I disagree with that one. I wrote a page on my site a few months
back: http://heybryan.org/self_replication.html
> Another issue is that designing self-replicable processes/systems is
> that it is like poking a very specific target through a very very
> tiny pinhole on the size of a few angstroms, and you have this giant
> baseball bat and you're swinging away at it. Given some object that
> you want to replicate, like a rock, you can't just ask it nicely
> please, would you be so kind as to proceed to duplicate yourself?
> This isn't going to work out. You can try. I am not going to stop
> you. But it will not work. Maybe that's a good television show to try
> out? The Rock Whisperer. I don't know what it would be about. It's
> just a rock sitting there. The functionality (indeed what little a
> rock has in the first place) isn't going to allow it to
> self-replicate, and the basis/design of that object's (rock's)
> functionality isn't necessarily ever going to be extendable to an
> extent to allow self-replication.
>
> So, if you give the system some parts anyway, parts that it doesn't
> automatically make, and as long as that system can replace those same
> parts later in its life cycle, then this is kind of like
> "replicable-integration", yes? Does it then qualify as
> self-replicable?
Anyway, with 'computational engineering' as you called it, different
criteria could easily be applied to different systems under design.
There's a common technique in programming where you "score" results
from a generator of some dataset, same thing here. You'd choose some
metrics and then have the program crawl through the database of
processes and their implementations and have them connect together,
then splurge out the instructions to make the whole thing (i.e., walk
down the hall to the rapid prototyper is a good first step).
> It has been pointed out that if a system is "truly isolated in the
> thermodynamic sense and also perhaps in a more absolute sense (no
> exchange of information with the environment) then it cannot be
> self-replicating without violating the laws of thermodynamics"
> (Heer,1980). While this is true, it should be noted that a system
> which achieves complete "closure" is not "closed" or "isolated" in
> the classical sense. Materials, energy, and information still flow
> into the system which is thermodynamically "open"; these flows are of
> indigenous origin and may be managed autonomously by the SRS itself
> without need for direct human intervention.
>
> An approach to the problem of closure in real engineering-systems is
> to begin with the issue of parts closure by asking the question: can
> a set of machines produce all of its elements? If the manufacture of
> each part requires, on average, the addition of >1 new parts to
> product it, then an infinite number of parts are required in the
> initial system and complete closure cannot be achieved. On the other
> hand, if the mean number of new parts per original part is <1, then
> the design sequence converges to some finite ensemble of elements and
> bounded replication becomes possible.