133. Robots Building Robots, Amazon’s Health Care Push, Tesla’s FSD Beta Available Now

<p><a href='https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/22/researchers-are-building-robots-that-can-build-themselves/?tpcc=tcplustwitter'>Researchers are building robots that can build themselves</a> | Tech Crunch (00:52)</p> <ul><li style="font-weight:400;">MIT researchers are working on a project to develop robots that effectively self-assemble.<ul><li style="font-weight:400;">Team admits this technology is “years away”</li> <li style="font-weight:400;">Work so far has shown positive results</li> </ul> </li> <li style="font-weight:400;">At the system’s center are voxels, which carry power and data that can be shared between pieces.</li> <li style="font-weight:400;">The pieces form the foundation of the robot by grabbing and attaching additional voxels before moving across the grid for further assembly.<ul><li style="font-weight:400;">Currently working on building stronger connectors to keep the voxels together.</li> </ul> </li> <li style="font-weight:400;">States in their <a href='https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-022-00034-3'>paper</a>:<ul><li style="font-weight:400;">“Our approach challenges the convention that larger constructions need larger machines to build them, and could be applied in areas that today either require substantial capital investments for fixed infrastructure or are altogether unfeasible.”</li> </ul> </li> <li style="font-weight:400;">The team suggests that using the robots to determine the optimal build could save on a lot of time spent prototyping.<ul><li style="font-weight:400;">“While there has been increasing interest in 3-D-printed houses, today those require printing machinery as large or larger than the house being built. Again, the potential for such structures to instead be assembled by swarms of tiny robots could provide benefits. And the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is also interested in the work for the possibility of building structures for coastal protection against erosion and sea level rise.”</li> </ul> </li> </ul> <p> </p> <p><a href='https://interestingengineering.co