The Milli-Motein (Millimeter-Scale Motorized Protein) is ca chain of programmable matter with a 1 cm pitch. It can fold itself into digitized approximations of arbitrary three-dimensional shapes. The small size of the Milli-Motein segments is enabled by the use of our new electropermanent wobble stepper motors, described in this paper, and by a highly integrated electronic and mechanical design. The chain is an interlocked series of connected motor rotors and stators, wrapped with a continuous flex circuit to provide communications, control, and power transmission capabilities. The Milli-Motein uses off-the-shelf electronic components and fasteners, and custom parts fabricated by conventional and electric discharge machining, assembled with screws, glue, and solder using tweezers under a microscope. We perform shape reconfiguration experiments using a four-segment Milli-Motein. It can switch from a straight line to a prescribed shape in 5 seconds, consuming 2.6 W power during reconfiguration. It can hold its shape indefinitely without power. During reconfiguration, a segment can lift the weight of one but not two segments as a horizontal cantilever.

This paper describes the design, fabrication, and experimental results of a programmable matter system capable of 2D shape formation through subtraction. The system is composed of autonomous 1cm modules which use custom-designed electropermanent magnets to bond, communicate, and share power with their neighbors. Given an initial block composed of many of these modules latched together in a regular crystalline structure, our system is able to form shapes by detaching the unnecessary modules. Many experiments show that the modules in our system are able to distribute data at 9600bps to their neighbors with a 98.5% success rate after four retries, and the connectors are able to support over 85 times the weight of a single module.

Computer science has served to insulate programs and programmers from knowledge of the underlying mechanisms used to manipulate information, however this fiction is increasingly hard to maintain as computing devices decrease in size and systems increase in complexity. Manifestations of these limits appearing in computers include scaling issues in interconnect, dissipation, and coding. Reconfigurable Asynchronous Logic Automata (RALA) is an alternative formulation of computation that seeks to align logical and physical descriptions by exposing rather than hiding this underlying reality. Instead of physical units being represented in computer programs only as abstract symbols, RALA is based on a lattice of cells that asynchronously pass state tokens corresponding to physical resources. We introduce the design of RALA, review its relationships to its many progenitors, and discuss its benefits, implementation, programming, and extensions