Apr. 2, 2012 Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which
you bury a tiny model of a footstool. A few seconds later, you
reach into the box and pull out a full-size footstool: The sand
has assembled itself into a large-scale replica of the model.
That may sound like a scene from a Harry Potter novel, but it's
the vision animating a research project at the Distributed
Robotics Laboratory (DRL) at MIT's Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. At the IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation in May DRL researchers
will present a paper describing algorithms that could enable
such "smart sand." They also describe experiments in which they
tested the algorithms on somewhat larger particles -- cubes
about 10 millimeters to an edge, with rudimentary
microprocessors inside and very unusual magnets on four of their
sides. Unlike many other approaches to reconfigurable robots,
smart sand uses a subtractive method, akin to stone carving,
rather than an additive method, akin to snapping