The Computation and Matter Area of the
Systems and Practices Laboratory at
Xerox PARC
exists for the purpose of bridging Computer Science with
Smart Matter and systemic MEMS.
We design, build, and study systems that trade complexity in computation for
cost, complexity, strength, or functionality in the physical world.
For example, here's a picture of an
active surface
that uses hundreds of jets of air
(individually controlled by a batch-fabricated array of valves),
and thousands of sensors,
to move a sheet of paper under precise control.
Such a system could one day replace the
mechanically complicated clutches and rollers
in a high-speed printer.
Some of the other CMA Smart Matter projects are
Modular
Robotics and
Collaborative Sensing.
Programming Smart Matter: Challenges
- Large-scale distributed control
- How to predict and control aggregate behavior without perfect
understanding of individual components?
- Fault-tolerant design
- How to use large numbers to provide robustness?
- Metrics
- What are the important performance metrics?
- How to trade off costs across the computation/matter boundary?
- Computational modeling
- How to make high-level models of smart matter systems?
- Methodology
- What are the right abstractions, languages, programming tools?
Map to PARC.
Directions to PARC.
Last updated by
John Gilbert
on March 25, 2001.