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"I prefer working by artificial light."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Robot Earthworm | ||
| Autonomous swarming robots the size of earthworms, with similar earth-digging capabilities. |
It feels safe in the underground bunker, covered by many yards of dirt and gravel. Until the tiny robot earthworms come.
| It resembled no machine that Pere had ever seen, rather it looked like a mass of tiny gleaming roots: the red earth still packed between them heightened the illusion.
"How does it work?" The robot reached out - leaning very close to focus its microscopic eyepieces - and carefully pulled one of the strands free. It lay on the robot's outstretched metallic palm, eight inches long, an eighth of an inch in diameter. Seen close it was not completely flexible, but made instead of pivoted and smoothly finished segments. The robot pointed out the parts of interest. "...At the front end is a hard-edged orifice that drills a hole in the ground. Debris is carried back through the body of the machine and eliminated here: in operation it is not unlike the common earthworm. Directional apparatus here guides it, oriented by a gravimeter to locate our base. Here a power unit and here a frequency generator... "They have no metallic components ... they move very slowly... we estimate they entered the ground four years ago." |
| Technovelgy from War With The Robots,
by Harry Harrison. Published by Pyramid Books in 1962 Additional resources -
|
Elsewhere they are referred to as "plastic spaghetti."
In their operation, these robot earthworms remind me of these real-life Self-Replicating Modular Robots (really an organized swarm of segments - "pivoted and smoothly finished segments"):
(Self-Replicating Modular Robots)
See also the organic mining worm from Larry Niven's 1968 book A Gift From Earth.
Compare to the metal worms from Vandals from the Moon (1928) by Marius, the mining worm robot from Love Among the Robots (1946) by Emmett McDowell, the robot snake from Bait for the Tiger (1952) by Lee Chaytor, the mechanical cobra from Lord of Light (1967) by Roger Zelazny, the digger worm from With Friends Like These (1985) by Connie Willis and the robot snake spy from Mariposa (2009) by Greg Bear.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from War With The Robots
More Ideas
and Technology by Harry Harrison
Tech news articles related to War With The Robots
Tech news articles related to works by Harry Harrison
Robot Earthworm-related
news articles:
- i-Snake Flexible Robot Surgeon Concept
- Meshworm Inches Toward You (Thanks, Harry Harrison)
- Israel Working On Tunnel Detection Snake Robots
- I Can't Resist Worm Robots
- Snakebot Burrows Underground, Thanks To Biomimicry Of Multiple Species
- Meshworm Soft Robot, With Peristaltic Crawling, Is Getting Better
| SnapBot Robots - You Choose Their Legs And They Choose Their Gaits |
| Humanoid Robots Building Humanoid Robots |
| What's The Best Way To Ship And Unpack Humanoid Robots? |
| SpiRobs Soft Spiral Robotic Arm |
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'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
