A

SEMINAR REPORT
ON

IN THE PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE DEGREE OF MASTER

OF COMPUTER APPLICATIONS

{SESSION 2007-2008}

SUBMITTED TO: SUBMITTED BY:

Miss SONIA PURI A.RAVI

Lecturer Roll No. 2601

MCA Department MCA-II (4th Semester)

 CONTENTS

1) INTRODUCTION

2) NANOTECHNOLOGY

3) THE FOG

4) PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF UTILITY FOG

5) FOGLETS IN DETAIL

6) GENERAL PROPERTIES AND USES

7) SMART DUST

8) PROBLEMS AND NON-PROBLEMS

9) LIMITATIONS OF UTILITY FOG

10) LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE

11) BIBLIOGRAPHY
 INTRODUCTION

Nanotechnology is based on the concept of tiny, self-replicating robots. The

Utility Fog is a very simple extension of the idea. Using nanotechnology, we can design
fully intelligent polymorphic material that consists, like your body, of trillions of
microscopic machines. Like our cells, each machine will have a substantial local program
and information storage, but will act in accordance with patterns of global information.
Unlike our cells, they will be more quickly and more widely reprogrammable, adopt a
wider array of functions, and look like spiders rather than jellyfish.

Suppose, instead of building the object one wants atom by atom, the tiny robots linked
their arms together to form a solid mass in the shape of the object.

The powers one would have or appear to have if embedded in fog are:

• Creation -- causing objects to appear and disappear on command.

• Levitation -- causing objects to hover and fly around.
• Manipulation -- causing forces (squeezing, hitting, pulling) on objects (real
ones) at a distance.
• Teleportation -- nearly any combination of telepresence and virtual reality
between fog-filled locations

Some of the basic properties of Utility Fog would be invisibility (when desired),
strength, and enormous computing power. Molecular size means too small to see, and in
low density formations (arms extended to maximum) it would flow easily as air. Speed-
At molecular sizes, robots would move interactively at about the speed of sound, almost
faster than we could see. The strength of a swarm of molecular sized robots would be
amazing... if desired as hard as cement, and in unison could lift a truck with ease.
 NANOTECHNOLOGY

"Nanotechnology is the manufacture of materials and structures with

dimensions that measure up to 100 nanometers (billionths of a meter)."

What is nano?

1 µm = one millionth of a meter

1 nm = one billionth of a meter

≈ 1/50,000 thickness of a hair!

Nano means “dwarf” and denotes a billionth

Why develop nanotechnology?

Gaining better control over the structure of atoms has been a primary object of all
developments. The quality of all human-made goods depends on the arrangement of
their atoms. The cost of our products depends on how difficult it is for us to get the
atoms and molecules to connect up the way we want them. The goal of
nanotechnology is to improve our control over how we build things, so that our
products can be of the highest quality and while causing the lowest environmental
impact.

 How can nanotechnology promise to build products with both

extreme precision in structure, and environmental cleanliness in the
production process?
 Traditional manufacturing builds in a "top down" fashion, taking a chunk of material
and removing chunks of it - for example, by grinding, or by dissolving with acids -
until the final product part is achieved.

The goal of nanotechnology is to instead build in a "bottom-up" fashion, starting

with individual molecules and bringing them together to form product parts in which
every atom is in a precise, designed location. In comparison with the top-down
approach, this method could potentially have much less material left over, greatly
reducing pollution.

 Why multiple sciences?

Nanotechnology is rapidly becoming an interdisciplinary field. Biologists,

chemists, physicists and engineers are all involved in the study of substances at the
nanoscale. Hence, different disciplines must develop a common language and
communicate with one another. Only then can we effectively teach nanoscience since
we can't understand the world of nanotechnology without a solid background in
multiple sciences.
 THE FOG

Utility Fog is a swarm of nanobots ("Foglets") that can take the shape of virtually

anything. Imagine a microscopic robot. It has a body about the size of a human cell and 12

arms sticking out in all directions. A bucketful of such robots might form a 'robot crystal'

by linking their arms up into a lattice structure. Now take a room, with people, furniture,

and other objects in it -- it's still mostly empty air. Fill the air completely full of robots.

The robots are called Foglets and the substance they form is Utility Fog, which may have

many useful medical applications. And when a number of utility foglets hold hands with

their neighbors, they form a reconfigurable array of smart matter.

The Utility Fog which is simulating air needs to be imaginary. One would like to

be able to walk through a Fog-filled room without the feeling of having been cast into a

block of solid. The whole point of having Fog instead of a purely virtual reality is to mix

virtual and physical objects in a seamless way.

The other major functions the air performs, that humans notice, are transmitting

sound and light. Both of these properties are hidden by the presence of Fog in the air, but

both can be simulated at a level sufficient to fool the senses of humans and most animals.
 The Fog acts as a continuous bridge between actual physical reality and virtual

reality. The Fog is universal effecter as well as a universal sensor. Any real object in the

Fog environment can be manipulated, with an extremely wide array of patterns of

pressure, force and support, measured, analyzed, weighed, cut, reassembled or reduced to

bacteria-sized pieces and sorted for recycling.

The Utility Fog operates in two modes: First, the ``naive'' mode where the robots

act much like cells, and each robot occupies a particular position and does a particular

function in a given object. The second, or ``Fog'' mode, has the robots acting more like the

pixels on a TV screen. The object is then formed of a pattern of robots, which vary their

properties according to which part of the object they are representing at the time. An

object can then move across a cloud of robots without the individual robots moving, just

as the pixels on a CRT remain stationary while pictures move around on the screen.
 PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF UTILITY FOG

Each Foglet has 12 arms, arranged as the faces of a dodecahedron. The arms
telescope rather than having joints. The arms swivel on a universal joint at the base, and
the gripper at the end can rotate about the arm's axis. The grippers at the end of each arm
have one degree of freedom, rotation, driven by a weak motor. Each arm thus has four
degrees of freedom, plus opening and closing the gripper. The only load-carrying motor
on each axis is the extension/retraction motor.

Grippers at the ends of the arms would allow the robots (or foglets) to
mechanically link to one another and share both information and energy, enabling them to
act as a continuous substance with mechanical and optical properties that could be varied
over a wide range. The gripper is a hexagonal structure with three fingers, mounted on
alternating faces of the hexagon. Two Foglets ``grasp hands'' in an interleaved six-finger
grip. Since the fingers are designed to match the end of the other arm, this provides a
relatively rigid connection; forces are only transmitted axially through the grip. When at
rest, the Foglets form a regular lattice structure like atoms, where each atom touches 12
other atoms.
 FOGLETS IN DETAIL

Foglets run on electricity, but they store hydrogen as an energy buffer. We pick
hydrogen in part because it's almost certain to be a fuel of choice in the nanotech world,
and thus we can be sure that the process of converting hydrogen and oxygen to water and
energy, as well as the process of converting energy and water to hydrogen and oxygen,
will be well understood. That means we'll be able to do them efficiently, which is of prime
importance.

The material properties of the fog depend on the programming of the robots. The
geometry is such that stresses in the material all appear as longitudinal forces along the
arms. Each Foglet can sense the force along each arm, and do something depending on the
magnitude and relation of those forces.

 If the program says, extend when the force is trying to stretch, retract when it is
trying to compress, we have a soft material. If it says, resist any change up to a
certain force, then let go, we have a hard but brittle material.

 If the programming says, maintains a constant total among the extension of all arms,
but otherwise do whatever the forces would indicate; and when a particular arm gets
to the end of its envelope, let go, and look for another arm coming into reach to
grab; you have a liquid. If we allow the sum of the arm extensions to vary with the
sum of the forces on the arms, we have something that approximates a gas within a
certain pressure range.
 GENERAL PROPERTIES AND USES

As well as forming an extension of the senses and muscles of individual people,

the Fog can act as a generalized infrastructure for society at large. Fog City need have no

permanent buildings of concrete, any roads of asphalt, any cars, trucks, or buses.

It will be more efficient to build dedicated machines for long distance energy and

information propagation, and physical transport. It can act as shelter, clothing, telephone,

computer, and automobile. It will be almost any common household object, appearing

from nowhere when needed and disappearing afterwards. It gains certain efficiency from

the extreme of polymorphism.

Nanotechnology will allow us to build some really monster computers. Although

each Foglet will possess a comparatively small processor--which is to say the power of a

current-day supercomputer--there are about 16 million Foglets to a cubic inch. When

those Foglets are not doing anything else, i.e. when they are simulating the interior of a

solid object or air that nothing is passing through at the moment, they can be used as a

computing resource.

The most obvious and first-mentioned applications of UF are virtual furniture that

appears and disappears from nothing. Another major advantage for space-filling Fog is

safety. In a nanotech based car Fog forms a dynamic form-fitting cushion that protects

better than any seatbelt of nylon fibers. An appropriately built house filled with Fog
could even protect its inhabitants from the (physical) effects of a nuclear weapon within

95% or so of its lethal blast area.

There are many more routine ways the Fog can protect its occupants, not the least

being physically to remove bacteria, mites, pollen, and so forth, from the air. A Fog-filled

home would no longer be the place that most accidents happen. First, by performing most

household tasks using Fog as an instrumentality, the cuts and falls that accompany the use

of knives, power tools, ladders, and so forth, can be eliminated.

Secondly, the other major class of household accidents, young children who injure

themselves out of ignorance, can be avoided by a number of means. A child who climbed

over a stair rail would float harmlessly to the floor. A child could not pull a bookcase over

on itself; falling over would not be among the bookcase's repertoire. Power tools, kitchen

implements, and cleaning chemicals would not normally exist; they or their analogs would

be called into existence when needed and vanish instead of having to be cleaned and put

away.

Outside the home, one can easily imagine ``industrial Fog'' which forms a factory.

It would consist of larger robots. Unlike domestic Fog, industrial Fog could have bulk

properties resembling hardwood or aluminum. A nanotechnology- age factory would

probably consist of a mass of Fog with special-purpose reactors embedded in it, where

high-energy chemical transformations could take place. All the physical manipulation,

transport, assembly, and so forth would be done by the Fog.

 SMART DUST

Smart dust is a collection of tiny electronic devices designed to capture mountains

of information about their surroundings while literally floating on air. Nowadays, sensors,
computers and communicators are shrinking down to ridiculously small sizes. If all of
these are packed into a single tiny device, it can open up new dimensions in the field of
communications.
The idea behind 'smart dust' is to pack sophisticated sensors, tiny computers and
wireless communicators in to a cubic-millimeter mote to form the basis of integrated,
massively distributed sensor networks. They will be light enough to remain suspended in
air for hours. As the motes drift on wind, they can monitor the environment for light,
sound, temperature, chemical composition and a wide range of other information and
transmit the collected data back to the base station located miles away.

Smart Dust requires both evolutionary and revolutionary advances in

miniaturization, integration and energy management. Designers can use
microelectromechanical systems to build small sensors, optical communication
components, and power supplies, whereas microelectronics provides increasing
functionality in smaller areas, with lower energy consumption. The power system consists
of a thick-film battery, a solar cell with a charge-integrating capacitor for periods of
darkness, or both. Depending on its objective, the design integrates various sensors,
including light, temperature, vibration, magnetic field, acoustic, and wind shear, onto the
mote. An integrated circuit provides sensor-signal processing, communication, control,
data storage, and energy management. A photodiode allows optical data reception.
 PROBLEMS AND NON-PROBLEMS

The question arises that how can people breathe when the air is a solid mass of
machines? The answer is in several parts: First, the Foglets only occupy a small
percentage of the actual volume of the air; they need lots of "elbow room" to move around
easily. Thus there's plenty of air left to breathe. The other part of the question has several
possible answers; Fog could enter your lungs, actively simulating the activity of
unoccupied air (and scrub your lungs of air pollution, smoke, and whatnot with every
breath), or form a Fog-free region around you into which fresh air was continually fanned.

What if the power fails and we are suddenly encased in solid unyielding material?
If Foglets have a failsafe mode where they let go their neighbors and retract their arms as
much as possible when they lose power, they form at first a super-heavy smoke or dust
storm, and would ultimately pack down into something like clay. Not something to look
forward to. Each Foglet would carry a certain amount of reserve power for normal
operations. Furthermore, the Fog should carry along small special purpose batteries/fuel
cells. Even larger power generators could be carried along with each person so their
personal cloud of Fog could be autonomously worn like a suit of clothes wherever they
went.

Another hard problem raised by UF is that it wipes off our intuitive notion of how
to tell who is and is not a person and who a particular person is. It removes every touch
point we have currently have in establishing the identity of others.
 LIMITATIONS OF UTILITY FOG

 Anything requiring hard metal -- For example, Fog couldn't simulate a drill
bit cutting through hardwood. It would be able to cut the hole, but the process would
be better described as intelligent sandpaper.

 Anything requiring both high strength and low volume -- A parachute

could not be made of Fog (unless, of course, all the air were filled with Fog, in which
case one could simply fly).

 Anything requiring high heat -- A Fog fire blazing merrily away on Fog logs in
a fireplace would feel warm on the skin a few feet away; it would feel the same to a
hand inserted into the ``flame''.

 Anything requiring molecular manipulation or chemical

transformation -- Foglets are simply on the wrong scale to play with atoms. In
particular, they cannot reproduce themselves. On the other hand, they can do things
like prepare food the same way a human cook does--by mixing, stirring, and using
special-purpose devices that were designed for them to use.

 Fog cannot simulate food or anything else that is destined to be

broken down chemically -- Eating it would be like eating the same amount of
sand or sawdust.
 LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE

Utility Fog could virtually read your mind, and anticipate a course of action... with
large arrays of molecular sized sensors. A physiological response related to joy would
cause the fog to part.... allowing the hug of a friend. A fight or flight response would turn
on security mode so that no one could touch you.

Even in your present biological form, UFog could be used as the interface between
you and the immediate environment. Unseen by it's owner or anyone else, the swarm of
molecular sized Nanobots would import materials and repair your body and
themselves. Damage repair would be immediate and complete: Nanobots both in and
outside your body would heal almost any wound. But, UFog would act as a shield before
any damage was done! The outer layers of fog would harden strong as rock in fractions of
a second, and the inner portion of the swarm would actively cushion your fragile body
better than the best air bag.

High bandwidth sensors and communications links would provide a profound and
intimate interface between the environment, other linked minds, and you. See in the
blackest night like Noon time, or view the enhanced reality of the inside of an object.

Need energy recharge for all those molecular machines? Energy harvest from
light, heat, motion, or chemistry and efficient energy storage would provide constant
power. When in contact with other UFog swarms, energy and material transfers would be
automatic, if needed.

Camouflage would be at least as good as looking through a pane of glass.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilityfog

 http://www.nanotech-now.com/utility-fog.htm

 http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?

main=/articles/art0220.html?

 http://www.university-help.blogspot.com/

 http://autogeny.org/Ufog.html

 http://www.fairpoint.net/~jpierce/utility_fog.htm

 http://www.foresight.org/nano/whatisnano.html

 http://www.wildirisdesign.com/nano/ufog.html

 http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?

main=/articles/art0219.html