Here's some emails between Benjamin D. Rister of CMU and myself...

======= Benjamin D. Rister's First Message... =======

Hi Jim,

Your note (http://www.robots.net/ar ticle/1530.html) showed up on my Google alert today, and I thought that as one of the people who started the project in the first place a quick note might help. The article you linked, in typical science reporting fashion, isn't either thorough or particularly accurate. Yes, it's certainly years and years away, but that's one thing the article did get right--they do have a quote from Jason in there on that.

I think your confusion probably comes from the fact that we're really doing something very different from the status quo, and a lot of the things you are skeptical about are things that we've made very conscious design choices about in order to achieve scalability, manufacturability, and in some cases just working in the first place. For instance, if you look at even the state of the art in research regarding latching mechanisms for modular robotics, it's glacially slow, and is usually cheated anyway (if you watch videos, there's usually cuts in there where somebody either manually connects something by hand or skips over the 5 minute latching process). These things need to move somewhat faster than that if they're going to animate a person. =) Also, as another example, electromagnetics are just a stopgap for these early prototypes--the technology scales with the catoms. The next step as we scale down is probably electrostatics, and we'll go from there.

Also, as a factual FYI, each of these things does have CPU resources and communication capability, even on the prototypes. Communication is the cornerstone of what's going to make Claytronics work! The hardware just gets easier as the years go by, but the truly difficult question is the control and collaboration between the catoms.

Anyway, just doing my part here to help the PR for the project. =) It's a way out, but every indication so far is positive, and the world-changing aspects of it have all of us very excited. We're just a couple of years old now, and are just starting to start the publication machine going, so keep an eye on the robotics conferences for all of the gruesome details. I think we have a power routing paper in the upcoming IROS...

Cheers,
br
--
Benjamin D. Rister
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bdr/

======= The Swirling Brain writes... =======

Thanks for the great information and the followup. I really do appreciate you emailing me about this. May I post your email below under the article so that all may get to read and benefit from this additional report?

Jim Brown

======= Benjamin D. Rister writes... =======

Sure, no problem, and of course I'm happy to answer any questions if they arise. We're all very excited about Claytronics here, and it's nice that word is starting to get outside of the academic circles about it, even if it does get diluted through various reporters.

Best,
br
--
Benjamin D. Rister
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bdr/