Spacecraft skin with ant logic

By at 7:44 am Monday, Sep 12

NASA and Australia's CSIRO are developing a smart spacecraft skin that uses emergence to self-diagnose damage and route around it. Eventually, the system could be a component in self-repairing aerospace vehicle. From New Scientist:
The team... has so far created a model skin made up of 192 separate cells. Behind each cell is an impact sensor and a processor equipped with algorithms that allow it to communicate only with its immediate neighbours. Just as ants secrete pheromones to help guide other ants to food, the CSIRO algorithms leave digital messages in cells around the system, indicating for instance the position of the boundary around a damaged region. The cell's processor can use this information to route data around the affected area.
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David Pescovitz

Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.

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