Adam Savage’s Maker Tour: MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (Part 2)

In the second part of his tour of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, Adam learns about multiple micron tools and meets BILL-E (Bipedal Isotropic Lattice Locomoting Explorer), an incredible robotic assembler that you’re going to have to see to believe. (This series and tour is made possible by The Fab Foundation and Chevron.)

Comments (11)

11 thoughts on “Adam Savage’s Maker Tour: MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (Part 2)

  1. The potential for this tech is pretty staggering. Particularly the nano lego blocks for building electronics and robots.

  2. Cool purpose driven stuff for sure. I find these short glimpses fairly rushed and it would help to get a more lay term translations of all the engineering lingo. Setup the importance of each experiment in one sentence which is tough. Know the problem well although I work on squishy soft things across the Charles river. Even Adam seems speechless as it takes a moment to comprehend the impact of all this technology transcending multiple order of magnitude.

  3. Great stuff. Keep posting. Have to watch this again. R&D is important and I’m pleased to see this set of film clips.

  4. Ummm – I have nothing to say about this …. as Adam often says, I’m Gobsmacked. Amazing Content, thx Tested.

  5. In this research setting, it is hard to see how the machines will work in their applications. This video nicely handles that, but it is hard to visualize. These assembly machines will need multiple materials in order to create functional machines with electro-mechanical behavior. The simulation/game showed that, but not how the first machine will make the second and the second, the third, and so on. As a result, micro-LEGO, as he said, seemed a project without a purpose. BILL-E had some of that ambiguity too. It is much more understandable, though, how pratical a scaffold-building machine would be.

    Color this engineer impressed.

  6. Amazing work! I just wish the supervisor would stop cutting off the graduate students mid-sentence.

  7. Amazing to see. The most impressivething to me is that space construction capability. As a clear example of how it will be useful, the international space station is a good example. The two main parts are the pressurised vessels, which are efectively tin cans that lock together, and the structural components such as the truss, which are built to be lightwieght and form the backbone of the station. Those trusses were built in sections on the ground and joined in space over multiple missions. The clearly superior way to do it is to send many parts and to manufacture the structure in position.

    When we create a station around the moon and mars in the future, it will be essential to send autonomous robots to perform this kind of construction, to lay out the path for human habition.

  8. Adam is so stunned in this segment, and I totally understand why. I think in this case, where the material is so heavy, a bit of rehearsal might have been beneficial.

    Other than that, super cool. Really love seeing the cutting edge of tech, doing what sounds impossible.

  9. Neil is still terrible at communication, just like in Part 1. As justifiably enthusiastic as he is about the amazing technology, he seems incredibly hasty, as if he desperately needed to get this over with, and strangely insistent on getting out very, very specific buzzwords, to the point of cutting people off and ignoring questions in order to spool off a rigid script.

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