Ensembles of millions of microbots

This paper is submitted to Invited Session: New Trends in Modular Robotics. Abstract— Taking the inevitability of micron-scale manufacturing as a starting point, we present claytronics, a modular robotics system designed to scale to millions of cooperating, sub-millimeter scale units. The goal is for the system to act as a coherent mass and thereby mimic, with high-fidelity and in 3dimensional solid form, the look, feel, and motion of macro-scale objects. As an early test of our concepts, we describe a working prototype system that, while both large (44mm in diameter) and restricted to a planar geometry, is designed so that the hardware and software will eventually scale up in the number of units and down in unit size. This design imperative leads us to the ensemble axiom: that individual units should include only enough functionality to contribute to the desired functionality of the ensemble. Among the novel aspects of our design is that the individual units, which we call claytronic atoms, or catoms, contain no moving parts. Our current prototype uses magnetic force to move the catoms; achieving better than 44mm/s and due to the genderless, single-ended contacts requires no extra time for docking. The catoms are spherical in order to allow multiple lattice and amorphous arrangments of the catoms. Also novel is the software infrastructure, which provides mechanisms for creating and maintaining multiple hierarchies of distributed control and communication, as well as coordinated motion planning through the manipulation of voids in the lattice of units.