Intel's BIG science

Another cute demo dealt with helping robots to interact with humans, presumably before they take over the world. The demo consisted of a robot arm developed in Intel’s Seattle research lab. This arm had a special sensor integrated into its hand, called electric field pretouch. It functions in a similar way to the electro sense possessed by some fish, which allows them to detect the presence of other objects nearby. For the robot, the sensor sits in between vision and touch and enables the arm to detect an object, follow it and grasp it cleanly.

Possibly the strangest demo of the conference was of a device called the ultrasonic phased array. This small tablet shaped device is kind of like a prototyping machine, which creates physical objects from a 3D computer rendering. Except instead of assembling a real object, this device uses ultrasonics to create the feeling of an object. Just input the shape you want and you can wave your hand over the tablet and the ultrasonics will give you the impression you can actually feel the object. Such a device may one day be useful for remote sensing where a human operator can get a real hands on feel of what’s going on somewhere else.

The final demo comes straight from science-fiction: programmable matter made from self assembling 3D nano robots. I’ve seen some early Intel research on this front from previous Intel Research Days, and I can guarantee you Intel is definitely keen on this technology. The idea is to have millions of tiny robots that interact with each other to create full objects that can be held, manipulated and even modified on the fly. This could be for prototyping, as mentioned above, or to produce a representation of a remote object. Intel has already played around with getting the concept to work by building larger devices, a few centimetres across, called catoms, that interact with each other using magnets in 2D. Smaller catoms have also been made that use electrostatics, including the latest work, which uses catoms 500 microns in diameter. Definitely a technology to watch.

Kevin Kahn, and Intel's crazy science research.

It’s easy to think of Intel as just a semiconductor manufacturer, but it’s forays into some wild and wondrous areas of speculative research are truly impressive. Whether they’ll lead us to the maw of the singularity is anyone’s guess. But there’s no question that if even a few of these technologies demoed at IDF Taiwan reach production, they have the potential to have a huge impact on our lives.