Origami Robot Folds Itself Up, Does Cool Stuff, Dissolves into Nothing | Hacker News Reader

Origami Robot Folds Itself Up, Does Cool Stuff, Dissolves into Nothing

spectrum.ieee.org

160 pointsspectro29 comments

While confessing to being a language lawyer: if an object gains all its immediate direction and energy from external sources how is it not a "puppet"? That is, isn't the expectation at least a tenuous amount of autonomy before it's termed a "robot"?

That sounds right. A robot has to sense something in its environment, then control something based on that measurement. Its not a high bar: even your thermostat is a robot.

I think it's high time a formal taxonomy of robots gets introduced.

There are humanoid robots, robots that simply do labor, autonomous, semi-autonomous, remote-controlled, etc. Your definition of sensing and control is new to me, personally, but valid of course. There are software robots, and then there are clickbaiters and charlatans making outrageous claims which lose their drama when an appropriate definition of robot is applied... We just need to straighten it all out, organize all of the things!

I think perhaps it's a matter of perspective. If you view the external source (magnets, etc) as part of the robot, then it's just a robot with two (or more) discrete parts. Is the robotic arm that gets it's power and direction from one or more cables connected to external systems not a robot? The difference here is that the control and power are more exotic than we are used to seeing.

Apart from looking cool, what does locomotion and folding do?

To me it looks not much different from one magnet on the surface and moving one underneath :)

it's mentioned in the article, but here all you have to do is orient a magnetic field, not move a magnet. Because of the shape of the robot, it will move in a direction related to the orientation of the field.

Given that it is externally powered, where would such a thing be useful today?

Today, not very many places. I can imagine a scenario where you want a large group of these to crawl through rubble to find people stuck under it. Most research like this comes with the hope of miniaturizing it enough for medical applications. Imagine this thing, but the size a grain of sand: entering your bloodstream, adapting to whatever task that needs to be done, and when it's finished moving to the stomach to get dissolved. In those applications, using external power makes complete sense, since it's a medical setting anyway, and it provides a great way to keep very fine control.

Is it just me or does it seem like the video was altered to make the motion smoother? Maybe it's just a very jittery robot.

The article says the magnets pulse at 15 Hz. And most of the video is sped up, so it would look extremely jittery.

Anyone ever assembled Ikea furniture? Imagine furniture that assembles itself when you get home.

Then it vibrates you to death.

Turn up the heat to 90 and leave home for a few hours, your furniture will be full assembled when you get back.

Is it just me or did that video look like stop motion? Probably just an illusion.

I actually thought it was a fake because of that. Then I read and discovered it's not actually a robot. Just some foil/magnet being driven by several relatively enormous electro-magnets.

It's just sped up, but that does give it a stop motion effect. The playback speed factor of each segment is in the bottom right corner.

Promoting the feature that it dissolves in acetone (and one day water) seems like this is being designed with nefarious purposes in mind. A robot that erases all traces of itself after completing its mission.

That depends on your perspective, particular since it says in the article "eventually, it'll be doing it inside your body". I believe it's intended for medical use.

Yep, once it's done it can just navigate to the nearest acetone reservoir in the body.

"Making the entire robot dissolve in water is a bit trickier, but the researchers seem confident that it’ll be possible in the near future."

But if it dissolves in water how is it supposed to make it anywhere inside your body? There's lots of water in there.

Contact lenses are ruined by contact with ordinary water but the saline solution and water in our eyes doesn't ruin them.

Same problem, there isn't really any pure water in your body to dissolve robots in either.

I downvoted your comment for the following reasons:

1. If you had read/comprehended the article you would understand how they plan to address this concern.

2. Really, even without reading the article, your comment just shows a failure of imagination. It's really not hard to see how this early prototype might be developed into more mature, useful applications.

Thank you for sharing your reasons for downvoting, but you're wrong. I did read the article, I do understand their plans and I didn't have a failure of imagination. It's cool tech, and I made a flippant joke in response to someone's comment.

Demoing that you can (partially) dissolve something in acetone or even water is not terribly impressive, even if their self-folding and mode of locomotion is pretty cool.

Ah I didn't really think of that - perhaps it was my own evil nature projecting onto the project!

It also strongly reminds me of DRM and planned obolescence.

If it dissolves into something harmless and possibly recyclable, then there is not much difference between it and nature - everything alive is built to decay and be used for something else.

But I agree that people seeking rent will be a problem. As usual.

More like you can distribute a 10,000 of them to clean up oil spill, toxic waste, kill mosquito larva, etc. and not worry too much about the environmental impact.

Except these are driven by external electro magnets.

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