ABSTRACT

The concept of Robotic foglets is based on the concept of tiny self replicating
robots. The Utility fog is just an extension of this idea. The concept of utility fog is
introduced as a useful provocation for imagining nanotechnology and its implications
in the future. A description of the technical specifications and uses of utility fog are
provided.

Utility fog is a concept that was developed by Dr. John Storrs Hall. It relies
on molecular manufacturing techniques to create tiny robots. The timescale for
realization of utility fog and other similar products is probably at least twenty to thirty
years away. In this concept the utility fog consists of robotic cells or ‘foglets’ of about
100 microns in size .Each foglet is equipped with a high capability processing
controller and electric motor. The central body is approximately spherical, about ten
microns. Each body has twelve telescopic arms about five microns in diameter and
fifty microns long that swivel on a universal joint. The end of the arms allows for
foglets to grip together and thus forms different shape and sized objects. The fog
could be manipulated by a remote control that could appear wand-like. This is a
clever observation given that the utility fog could enable creation, levitation,
manipulation, teleportation and shape-shifting. Suddenly the magic in Harry Potter no
longer look likes fantasy.

Utility fog should be capable of simulating most everyday materials,

dynamically changing its form and forming a substrate for an integral virtual reality.
This paper will examine the basic concept, and explore some of the applications of
this material.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
Abstract 1
List of figures 3

Chapter No Title Page No.

1 Introduction 4
2 Behind the scene 7
2.1 The Stuffs that Dreams are made of 7
2.2 Modes of operation 9
3 How to Build a Fog 11
3.1 Design Issues 11
3.2 Utility Fog: The components proposed 13
3.2.1 A Foglet 17
3.2.2 The grip 18
3.3 Foglets in detail 19
3.3.1 Foglets – internal schematic 21
4 Communication and Control 23
5 Combination with other technologies 25
6 General properties and uses 27
7 Limitations of utility fog capability 28
7.1 Other desirable limitations 29
8 Advantages of a utility fog environment 31
9 Applications 33
9.1 Space Exploration 33
10 Conclusion 35
11 References 36

LIST OF FIGURES

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
Fig. No. NAME PAGE No.

2.1 The expansion of a foglet 8

2.2.1 Arrangement of Utility Fog 10
3.2.1 Foglet having 12 arms 13
3.3.1 Connecting Structure of a Foglet 16
3.2.2 The Grip of a Foglet 17
3.3.1 Internal Diagram of a Foglet 20
3.3.2 Three layers of foglets 21

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 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. With the right programming, the robots can exert any force
in any direction on the surface of any object. They can support the object, so that it
apparently floats in the air. They can support a person, applying the same pressures to
the seat of the pants that a chair would.

They can exert the same resisting forces that elbows and fingertips would
receive from the arms and back of the chair. A program running in the Utility Fog can
thus simulate the physical existence of an object.

Although this class of nanotechnology has been envisioned by the technocracy

since early times, and has been available to us for over twenty years, the name is more
recent. A mundane scientist, J. Storrs Hall provided an important baseline
examination of the issues involved in the application and design of Utility fog. He
envisioned it as an active polymorphic material designed as a conglomeration of 100-
micronrobotic cells or foglets, built using molecular nanotechnology. An appropriate
mass of Utility Fog could be programmed to simulate, to the same precision as
measured by human senses, most of the physical properties, such as hardness,
temperature, light, of any macroscopic object, including expected objects such as
tables and fans, but also materials such as air and water. The major exceptions would
be taste, smell, and transparency. To users, it would seem like the Star Trek Helideck
except that it would use atoms instead of holographic illusions. It is an indication of
the degree to which our science and technology have permeated society that a non
member could so accurately describe and visualise the way in which "Utility Fog"
operates.

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

Utility Fog is a very simple extension of the idea: Suppose, instead of building the
object you want atom by atom, the tiny robots linked their arms together to form a
solid mass in the shape of the object you wanted? Then, when you got tired of that
simple table, the robots could simply shift around a little and you'd have an elegant
table instead.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 The colour and reflectivity of an object are results of its properties as an
antenna in the micron wavelength region. Each robot could have an "antenna arm"
that it could manipulate to vary those properties, and thus the surface of a Utility Fog
object could look just about however you wanted it to. A "thin film" of robots could
act as a video screen, varying their optical properties in real time.

Rather than paint the walls, coat them with Utility Fog and they can be a
different colour every day, or act as a floor to-ceiling TV. Indeed, make the entire
wall of the Fog and you can change the floor plan of your house to suit the occasion.
Make the floor of it and never gets dirty, looks like hardwood but feels like foam
rubber, and extrudes furniture in any form you desire. Indeed, your whole domestic
environment can be constructed from Utility Fog; it can form any object you want
(except food) and whenever you don't want an object any more, the robots that formed
it spread out and form part of the floor again.

You may as well make your car of Utility Fog, too; then you can have a "new"
one every day. But better than that, the *interior* of the car is filled with robots as
well as its shell. You'll need to wear holographic "eye phones" to see, but the Fog will
hold them up in front of your eyes and they'll feel and look as if they weren't there.
Although heavier than air, the Fog is programmed to simulate its physical properties,
so you can't feel it: when you move your arm, it flows out of the way. Except when
there's a crash! Then it forms an instant form-fitting "seatbelt" protecting every inch
of your body.

You can take a 100-mph impact without messing your hair. Remember that
each of these robots contains a fair-sized computer. They already have to be able to
talk to each other and coordinate actions in a quite sophisticated way (even the
original Nano-assemblers have to, build Division any macroscopic object). You can
simply cover the road with a thick layer of robots. Then your car "calls ahead" and
makes a reservation for every position in time and space it will occupy during the trip.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 Chapter 2

BEHIND THE SCENE

2.1 THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF

In the late twenty-first century, the “real” world will take on many of the
characteristics of the virtual world through the means of nanotechnology “swarms.”

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
Consider, for example, Rutgers University computer scientist J. Storrs Hall’s concept
of “Utility Fog”. Hall’s conception starts with a little robot called a Foglet, which
consists of a human cell-sized device with twelve arms pointing in all directions. At
the end of the arms are grippers so that the Foglets can grasp one another to form
larger structures. These nanorobots are intelligent and can merge their computational
capacities with each other to create a distributed intelligence. A space filled with
Foglets is called Utility Fog and has some interesting properties.

First of all, the Utility Fog goes to a lot of trouble to simulate it's not being
there. Hall describes detailed scenarios that lets a real human walk through a room
filled with trillions of Foglets and not notice a thing. When desired (and it’s not
entirely clear whose doing the desiring), the Foglets can quickly simulate any
environment by creating all sorts of structures. As Hall puts it, “Fog city can look like
a park, or a forest, or ancient Rome one day and Emerald City the next.

The Foglets can create arbitrary wave fronts of light and sound in any
direction to create any imaginary visual and auditory environment. They can exert any
pattern of pressure to create any tactile environment. In this way, Utility Fog has all
the flexibility of a virtual environment, except it exists in the real physical world. The
distributed intelligence of the Utility Fog can simulate the minds of scanned (Hall
calls them “uploaded”) people who are recreated in the Utility Fog “Fog people.” In
Hall’s scenario, “a biological human can walk through Fog walls, and a Fog
(uploaded) human can walkthrough dumb-matter walls. Of course Fog people can
walk through Fog walls, too.”

The physical technology of Utility Fog is actually rather conservative. The

Foglets are much bigger machines than most nanotechnology conceptions. The
software is more challenging, but ultimately feasible. Hall needs a bit of work on his
marketing angle: Utility Fog is a rather dull name for such versatile stuff. There are a
variety of proposals for nanotechnology swarms, in which the real environment is
constructed from interacting multitudes of nanomachines. In all of the swarm
conceptions, physical reality becomes a lot like virtual reality you can be sleeping in
your bed one moment, and have the room transform into your kitchen as you awake.
Actually, change that to a dining room as there’s no need for a kitchen. Related
nanotechnology will instantly create whatever meal desire. When you finish eating,

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
the room can transform into a study, or a game room, or a swimming pool, or a
redwood forest, or the Taj Mahal

Fig 2.1 the expansion of a foglet

2.2 MODES OF OPERATION

The Nano-constructs operate in two modes - "native", and "fog". In "native"

mode, individual foglets move into different positions and perform certain mechanical
operations depending on what object it is forming. For example, if it forms part of
actable, then it would be motionless and locked. If the object was a fan, then most of
the structure would remain locked, and only the foglets between the two parts would
need to move. With a suit made of Fog, you might wrestle alligators, cheating a little
by having the suit amplify your movements as it protects you from the alligator's
teeth.

In "fog" mode, the foglets do not move, but act more like pixels on a
television screen -they "pixelate". The foglets vary other properties according to
which part of the object they are representing, generally transmitting information and
sound. A Fog-filled room would contain 90% air, and surround its occupant with a
display screen with 100 micron resolution. Meanwhile, each litre of foglets behind the

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
display would contain about billion times the processing power of a 286 PC, making
possible some pretty impressive virtual reality simulations.

The Utility Fog which is simulating air needs to be impalpable. 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 Lucite. It is also desire-able to be able to breathe while using
the Fog in this way! To this end, the robots representing empty space constantly run a
fluid-flow simulation of what the air would be doing if the robots weren’t there. Then
each robot does what it displaces would do in its absence.

How can one breathe when the air is a solid mass of machines? Actually, it
isn’t really solid: the Foglets only occupy about 10% of the actual volume of the air
(they need lots of "elbow room" to move around easily). There’s plenty of air left to
breathe. As far as physically breathing it, we set up a pressure-sensitive boundary
which translates air motions on one side to Fog motions on the other. It might even be
possible to have the Fog continue the air simulation all the way into the lungs. To
understand why we want to fill the air with microscopic robots only to go to so much
trouble to make it seem as if they weren’t there, consider the advantages of a TV or
computer screen over an ordinary picture. Objects on the screen can appear and
disappear at will; they are not constrained by the laws of physics. The whole scene
can shift instantly from one apparent locale to another. Completely imaginary
constructions, not possible to build in physical reality, could be commonplace.
Virtually anything imaginable could be given tangible reality in a Utility Fog
environment.

Why not, instead, build a virtual reality machine that produces a purely
sensory version of the same apparent world? The Fog acts as a continuous bridge
between actual physical reality and virtual reality. The Fog is universal effectors 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
supported, measured, analysed, weighed, cut, reassembled, or reduced to bacteria-
sized pieces and sorted for recycling. Utility Fog can act as a transparent interface
between "cyberspace" and physical reality.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
Fig.2.2.1 Arrangement of Utility Fog.
Chapter 3

HOW TO BUILD A FOG

3.1 DESIGN ISSUES

The only major breakthrough necessary to enable us to build the Fog world is
nanotechnology itself. Assemblers, the sine qua non of nanotechnology, will require
two major feats of molecular engineering: building molecular-sized, individually
controllable, physical actuators, arms, motors, gears, sprockets, pulleys, and the like;
and then building molecular sized computers to control them.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 Foglets need not be controllable to the same precision as true assemblers:
They do not need to control chemical reactions at the atomic level. In fact, the only
constraint on sizes is the ability to form a smooth enough surface to fool human
senses. The lower limit, based on designs from Nanosystems, is about a 1 or 2 micron
body and 5 to 10 micron arms. The upper limit for completely undetectable
granularity is probably about 50 to 100microns, the range of diameter of human hair.
If "super high fidelity" isn't critical, 1 mm Foglets would likely be able to do all the
physical tasks of interest. The user, embedded in the Fog, is not really looking at it but
at a synthetic image, probably generated by a pair of active holographic contact
"lenses". The original designed the Foglets to be very small, so that they were less
than the wavelength of light, in hopes that Fog could be transparent. After running the
idea past several people, including Drexler, they managed to convince that even
Foglets of subliminal size, even though quite invisible individually, would cause
enough scattering that a cloud of them would look like, surprise, a cloud.

For applications not involving the embedding of humans, "Foglets" could be

of any size consonant with the objects they had to manipulate. Imagine building a
skyscraper behaving a solid mass of robots each a foot or so in size, form an active
scaffold in which beams and blocks and plates were moved around, hand over hand.
Such "Foglets" could be built today; but they would be way too expensive for this
kind of application. Fog needs the self-reproducing productivity of nanotechnology to
be economical. After all, filling an average house with even coarse 1 mm Foglets
requires over a trillion of them, and for the hi-fi Foglets it's a quadrillion (1015) of
them. For you to be able to afford them they'd better cost less than $0.00000000001
apiece. (If you were very rich, you might be able to afford $0.000000001 Foglets.)

What Foglets don't need is to be individually self-reproducing. Foglets, small

though they may be on the macroscopic scale, are just a completely different kind of
machine than self reproducing assemblers. Assembler will be most efficient when
they work in vat of special precursor chemicals. This will also constitute a built-in
safety factor against runaway replication: after all, you don't worry about baking yeast
taking over the whole world when you make homemade bread; when it runs out of
dough, it stops. Foglets operate out in the real world, with motion tolerances bigger
than the assembler's entire working envelope.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 We'd expect Foglets to be built like virtually any other end product of a nano-
based technology. There will in all likelihood not only be specialized Fog-making
machines... The more specialized a production process is, the more efficient. The
general-purpose assembler is a necessary bootstrap, but as nanotechnology matures it
will engender longer and more complicated self-referential loops. The typical
specialized nano-factory will be a breadbox to refrigerator-sized object, with literally
trillions of parallel assembly lines converging in a tree-like structure to produce ever-
larger subcomponents of the end product. For something as small as a Foglets the
factory could be quite a bit smaller, of course.

3.2 UTILITY FOG: THE COMPONENTS PROPOSED

The components which are required to make utility fog are of a much concern
for its development.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 Fig.3.2.1 Foglet having 12 arms.

Most currently proposed nanotechnological designs are based on carbon.

Carbon is a marvellous atom for structural purposes, forming a crystal (diamond) as
shown in fig3.2.1 which is very stiff and strong. However, a Fog built of diamond
would have a problem which nanomechanical designs of a more conventional form do
not pose: the Fog has so much surface area exposed to the air that if it were largely
diamond, especially on the surface, it would amount to a "fuel-air explosive".

Therefore the Foglet is designed so that its structural elements, forming the
major component of its mass, are made of aluminium oxide, a refractory compound
using common elements. The structural elements form an exoskeleton, which besides
being good mechanical design allows us to have an evacuated interior in which more
sensitive nanomechanical components can operate. Of course, any macroscopic
ignition source would vaporize the entire Foglet; but as long as more energy is used
vaporizing the exoskeleton than is gained burning the carbon-based components
inside, the reaction cannot spread.

Each Foglet has twelve 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 cart rotate about the arm’s axis.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 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.
The swivel and rotate axes are weakly driven, able to position the arm in free air but
not drive any kind of load; however, there are load holding brakes on these axes.

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. If the bodies of the
Foglets are thought of as atoms, it is a "face-cantered cubic" crystal formation, where
each atom touches 12 other atoms. . The spaces bounded by the arms form alternate
tetrahedrons
And octahedrons, both of which are rigid shapes.

The Fog may be thought of as consisting of layers of Foglets. Tire layers, and
the shear planes they define, lie at 4 major angles (corresponding to tire faces of the
tetrahedrons and octahedrons) and 3 minor ones (corresponding to tire face-cantered
cube faces). In each of the 4 major orientations, each Foglet uses six arms to hold its
neighbours in the layer; layers are thus a 2-dimensionally rigid fabric of equilateral
triangles. In face entered mode, the layers work out to the square grids, and are thins
not rigid, a slight disadvantage. Most Fog motion is organized in layers; layers slide
by passing each other down hand-over-hand in bucket brigade fashion. At any instant,
roughly half the arms will lie lurked between layers when they are in motion.

The Fog moves an object by setting up a seed-shaped zone around it. The
Foglets in the zone move with the object, forming a fairing which makes the motions
around it smoother. If the object is moving fast, the Fog around its path will compress
to let it go by. The air does not have time to move in the Fog matrix and so the motion
is fairly efficient. For slower motions, efficiency is not so important, but if we wish
top regent slow-moving high-pressure areas from interfering with other airflow
operations, we can enclose the object’s zone in a self-contained convection cell which
moves Foglets from in front to behind it.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 Each moving layer of robots is similarly passing the next layer along, so each
layer adds another increment of the velocity difference of adjacent layers. Motors for
arm extension can run at a gigahertz, and be geared down by a factor of 100 to the
main screw in the arm. This will have a pitch of about a micron, giving a linear
extension/retraction rate of about 10 meters per second. We can estimate the inter-
layer shear rate at this velocity; the foglets are essentially pulling themselves along.
Thus for a 100-micron interlayer distance Fog can sustain a 100 meter-per-second
shear per millimetre of thickness.

The atomically-precise crystals of the Foglets’ structural members will have a

tensile strength of at least 100,000 psi (i.e. high for steel but low for the materials,
including some fairly refractory ceramics, used in modern "high-tech" composites).
At arm's length of 100 microns, the Fog will occupy 10% of the volume of the air but
has structural efficiency of only about 1% in any given direction.

Thus Utility Fog as a bulk material will have a density (specific gravity) of
0.2; for comparison, balsa wood is about 0.15 and cork is about 0.25. Fog will have a
tensile strength of only 1000 psi; this is about the same as low-density polyethylene
(solid, not foam). The material properties arising from the lattice structure are more or
less isotropic; the one exception is that when Fog is flowing, tensile strength
perpendicular tithe shear plane is cut roughly in half.

Without altering the lattice connectivity, Fog can contract by up to about 40%
in any linear dimension, reducing its overall volume (and increasing its density) by a
factor office. (This is of course done by retracting all arms but not letting go.) In this
state the fog has the density of water. An even denser state can be attained by forming
two interpenetrating lattices and retracting; at this point its density and strength would
both be similar to ivory or Corian structural plastic, at specific gravity of 2 and about
6000 psi. Such high density Fog would have time useful property of being waterproof
(which ordinary Fog is not), but it cannot flow and takes much longer to change
configuration. Selective application of this technique allows Fog to simulate shapes
and flow fields to precision considerably greater than 100 microns.

An appropriate mass of Utility Fog can be programmed to simulate most of

the physical properties of any macroscopic object (including air and water); to

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
roughly the same precision those properties are measured by human senses. The
major exceptions are taste, smell, and transparency. The latter can be overcome with
holographic "eye phones" if a person is to be completely embedded in Fog.

3.2.1 A FOGLET

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 A foglet is the basic component of the Utility fog as several number of them
forms a fog.Fig.3.3.1 Connecting Structure Of a Foglets depicted by fig 3.3.1 one can
see the dodecahedral structure of the utility fog. The arms of the foglets are having
grippers which are used for interconnection between two foglets. The connection
socket here is used for tight combination of two arms of different foglets.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
3.2.2 THE GRIP

Grip is the most important part of the foglet as the whole arrangement depends
upon the interconnection of the grips.

Fig.3.2.2 the Grip of a Foglet

The Grip consists of basic four divisions. The first one is coupler which is
used for the communication and power controlling purpose. It can be considered as
the head of this division. Then we have Optical Waveguide for communication from
the user so that it could get the commands for its performance. The power and
electrical transmission lines are used for the power supply in this foglet and finally we
have couplers which are used for locking of the two foglets together.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
3.3 FOGLET 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. Suppose that the Fog is flowing, layers sliding against
each other, and some force is being transmitted through the flow. This would happen
any time the Fog moved some non-Fog object, for example. Just as human muscles
oppose each other when holding something tightly, opposing forces along different
Foglet arms act to hold the Fog's shape and supply the required motion. When two
layers of Fog move past each other, the arms between may need to move as many as
100 thousand sand times per second. Now if each of those motions was dissipative,
and the fog was under full load, it would need to consume 700 kilowatts per cubic
centimetre. This is roughly the power dissipation in a .45 calibre cartridge in the
millisecond after the trigger is pulled; i.e. it just won’t do.

But nowhere near this amount of energy is being used; the pushing arms are
supplying this much but the arms being pushed are receiving almost the same amount,
minus the work being done on the object being moved. So if the motors can act as
generators when they're being pushed, each Foglet’s energy budget is nearly balanced.
Because these are arms instead of wheels, the intake and outflow do not match at any
given instant, even though they average out the same over time (measured in tens of
microseconds). Some buffering is needed. Hence hydrogen is used.

I should hasten to add that almost never would one expect the Fog to move
actively at1000 psi; the pressure in the column of Fog beneath, say, a "levitated"
human body isles than one thousandth of that. The 1000 psi capability is to allow the
Fog can simulate hard objects, where forces can be concentrated into very small areas.
Even so, current exploratory engineering designs for electric motors have power
conversion densities up to a billion watts per cubic centimetre, and dissipative
inefficiencies in the 10 parts per million ranges. This means that if time Empire State

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
Building was being floated around on a column of Fog, time Fog would dissipate less
than a watt per cubic centimetre.

Moving Fog will dissipate energy by air turbulence and viscous drag. In the
large, air will been trained in the layers of moving Fog and forced into laminar flow.
Energy consumed in this regime may be properly thought of as necessary for the
desired motion no matter how it was done. As for the waving of the arms between
layers, the Reynolds Number decreases linearly with the size of the arm. Since the
absolute velocity of the arms is low, i.e. 1 m/s, the Reynolds number should be well
below the "lower critical" value and the arms should be operating in a perfectly
viscous regime with no turbulence. The remaining effect, viscous drag (on the waving
arms) comes to a few watts per square meter of shear plane per layer. There will
certainly be some waste heat generated by Fog at work that will need to be dissipated.
This and other applications for heat pumps, such as heating or cooling people (no
need to heat the whole house, especially since some People prefer different
temperatures), can be done simply by running a flow of Fog through a pipe-like
volume which changes in area, compressing and expanding tire entrained air at the
appropriate places.

3.3.1 FOGLET – INTERNAL SCHEMATIC

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 The figure 3.3.1 shows the internal diagram of a foglet which is the basic
component of utility fog.

Fig.3.3.1 Internal Diagram of a Foglet (more or less to scale) All the working
movements depends on the programming of the foglets for their arrangements.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 The Foglets arrange themselves in three layers where they slide over one
another to form a new structure is as shown in Fig. 3.3.2, has three layers of foglets. If
the programming says, maintain 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 liquid. If you allow the sum of the arm extensions to vary with the sum of
the force son the arms, you have something that approximates a gas within a certain
pressure range. Note that because the foglets can use their own power to move or
resist moving, the apparent density and viscosity of the fluid can anything from dense
toner vacuum.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 Chapter 4

COMMUNICATIONS AND CONTROL

In the macroscopic world, microcomputer-based controllers (e.g. the widely

used Intel8051 series microcontrollers) typically run on a clock speed of about 10
MHz They emit control signals, at most, on the order of 10 kHz (usually less), and
control motions in robots that are at most 10 Hz, i.e. a complete motion taking one
tenth of a second. This million-clocks-per-action is not strictly necessary, of course;
but it gives us some concept of the action rate we might expect for a given computer
clock rate in a digitally controlled nanorobot. Drexler’s carefully detailed analysis
shows that it is possible to build mechanical nanocomputers with gigahertz clock
rates. Thus we can immediately expect to build nanocontroller which can direct a 10
kilohertz robot. However, we can do better.

Since tire early microcontrollers were developed, computer architecture has advanced.
The 8051’s do 1 instruction per 6, 12, or 18 clock cycles; modern RISC architectures
execute 1 instruction per cycle. So far, nobody has bothered to build a RISC
microcontroller, since they already have more computing power than they need.
Furthermore, RISC designs are efficient in hardware as well as time; one early RISC
was implemented on a 10,000-gate gate array. This design could be translated into rod
logician less than one tenth of one percentage of a cubic micron.

Each Foglet is going to have 12 arms with three axis control each. In current
technology it isn’t uncommon to have a processor per axis; we could fit 36 processors
into the Foglet but it isn’t necessary. The trade-offs in macroscopic robotics today are
such that processors are cheap; in the Foglet timings are different. The control of the
arms is actually much simpler than control of a macroscopic robot. They can be
managed by much simpler controllers that take commands hike "Move to point X at
speed y." Using arise design allows a single processor to control a 100 kHz arm; using
auxiliary controllers will let it do all 12 easily.

But there is still a problem: Each computer, even with the power-reducing
reversible logic designs, is going to dissipate a few nanowatts. At a trillion foglets per

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
cubic meter, this is a few kilowatts per cubic meter. Cooling for such dissipation must
needs hedonic-where between substantial and heroic. As long as the computers can go
into standby mode when the Fog is standing still, however, this is quite workable.
Concentrations of heavy work, mechanical or computing, would still require cooling
circulation to sumac degree, but, as we have seen, the Fog is perfectly capable of
doing that.

What about all the other computing overhead for the Fog? Besides the
individual control of its robotic self, each Foglet will have to run a portion of time
overall distributed control and communications algorithms. We can do another clock-
speed to capability analogy from current computers regarding communications.
Megahertz-speed computers find themselves well employed managing a handful of
megabit data lines, again we are forced to abandon the engineering trade-offs of the
macroscopic world: routing of message through any given node need theoretically
consume only a handful of thermodynamically irreversible bit operations; typical
communications controllers take millions. Special-purpose message routers designed
with these facts in mind must be a part of the Foglet.

If the Fog were configured as a store-and-forward network, packets with an

average length of 100 bytes and a 1000-instruction overhead, information would
move through the Fog at 50 meters/second, i.e. 110 mph. It represents a highly
inefficient use of computation even with special-purpose hardware. It will be
necessary to design a more efficient communication protocol. Setting up "virtual
circuits" in the Fog amid using optical repeaters (or simply mechanically switching
the optical waveguides) should help considerably.

Chapter 5

COMBINATION WITH OTHER TECHNOLOGIES

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF
ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 The counterintuitive inefficiency in communications is an example, possibly
the most extreme one, of a case where macroscopic mechanisms outperform the Fog
at some specific task. This will be even truer when we consider nano-engineered
macroscopic mechanisms. We could imagine a robot, human-sized, that was formed
of collection of nano-engineered parts held together by a mass of Utility Fog. The
parts might include "bones", perhaps diamond-fibber composites, having great
structural strength; motors, power sources, and so forth. The parts would form a sort
of erector set that the surrounding Fog would assemble to perform the task at hand.
The Fog could do directly all subtasks not requiring the excessive strength, power,
and so forth that the special-purpose parts would supply.

The Fog house, or city, would resemble the Fog robot in that regard. The roof
of a house might well be specially engineered for qualities of water proofers, solar
energy collection, and resistance to general abuse, far exceeding that which ordinary
general-purpose Fog would leave. (On the other hand, the Fog could, if desired, have
excellent insulating properties.) Of course the roof need not be one piece-it might be
inch-square tiles held in place by the supporting Fog, and thus be quite amenable to
rearrangement at the owner's whim, incremental repair and replacement, and all the
other advantages we expect from a Fog house.

Another major component that would be special-purpose would be power and

communications. Working on more-efficient protocols such as suggested above, the
Fog would form an acceptable communications link from a person to some terminal
in the same building; but it would be extremely inefficient for long-haul, high
bandwidth connections such as that needed for telecommunication.

Power is also almost certainly the domain of special-purpose nano-engineered

mechanisms. Power transmission in the Fog is likely to be limited, although for
differences from data transmission. Nanotechnology will give us an amazing array of
power generation and distribution possibilities, and the Fog can use most of them.

The critical heterogeneous component of Fog is the Fog-producing machine.

Foglets are not self-reproducing; there is no need for them to be, and it would

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
complicate their design enormously to give them fine atom-manipulating capability.
One imagines a Fog machine the size of a breadbox producing Fog for a house, or
building-sized machines filling cities with Fog. The Fog itself, of course, conveys raw
materials back to the machine.

Chapter 6

GENERAL PROPERTIES AND USES

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 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 busses. It can look like a park, or a forest, or if the population is sufficiently
whimsical, ancient Rome one day and Emerald City the next.

It will be more efficient to build dedicated machines for long distance energy
and information propagation, and physical transport. For local use, and interface to
the worldwide networks, the Fog is ideal for all of these functions. 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 ascertain efficiency from this extreme of polymorphism; consider
the number of hardcopy photographs necessary to store all the images one sees on a
television or computer screen. With Utility Fog we can have one "display" and keep
our entire physical possession on disk.

Another item of infrastructure that will become increasingly important in the

future is information processing. 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 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 (with the
caveats below).

Chapter 7

LIMITATIONS OF UTILITY FOG CAPABILITY

When discussing something as far outside of’ everyday experience as the

Utility Fog, it is a good idea to delineate both sides of the boundary? The Fog is
capable of so many literally amazing things, we will point out a few of the things it

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
isn’t capable of: Anything requiring hard metal (cold steel).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 couldn't 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 them. On the other hand, they can do things like
prepare food the same way a hit-man cook does—by mixing, stirring, and using
special-purpose devices that were designed for theta 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. Fog can simulate air to the touch hut not
to the eyes. The best Indications are that it would look like heavy fog. Thus the Fog
would need to support apiary of holographic goggles in front of the eyes of an
embedded user. Such goggles are clearly within the capabilities of the same level of
nanotechnology as is needed for the Fog.

7.1 OTHER DESIRABLE LIMITATIONS

The machine works "not wisely but too well," manifesting all the deeply
buried Subconscious desires of the Krell (A play writer) to destroy each other.

Utility Fog will provide humans with powers that. Approximate those of the
fictional Krell machine. Luckily, we have centuries of literary tradition to guide us
around the Pitfalls of hubris made reality. We must study this tradition, or we may be
doomed to repeat it a truth that is by no means limited to the Utility Fog or indeed to
Nanotechnology in general.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 The first thing we can do is to require fully conscious, unequivocal commands
for the Fog to take any action. Beyond that, we can try to suggest some of the
protocols that maybe useful in managing the Fog in a situation where humans are
interacting in close Physical proximity. Even if we have solved the problem of
translating one’s individual Wishes, however expressed, into the quadrillions of sets
of instructions to individual Foglets to accomplish what one desired, the problem of
who gets to control which Foglets is probably a much more contentious one.

We can physicalize the psychological concept of "personal space". The

Foglets within Some distance of each person would be under that person’s exclusive
control; personal Spaces could not merge except by mutual consent. This single
protocol could prevent most crimes of violence in our hypothetical Fog City.

A corollary point is that physically perpetrated theft would be impossible in a

Fog world. It would still be possible by informational means, i.e. fraud, hacking, etc.
but the Fog could be programmed to put ownership on the level of a physical law. Not
that it really makes any sense to think of stealing a fog-mode object, anyway.
Ownership and control Of the Fog need not be any more complex than the bundles of
rights currently associated with everything from land to corporate stock. Indeed, much
of the programming of the Fog will need to have the character of physical Laws. In
order for the enormous potential complexity to be comprehensible and thus Usable to
human beings, it needs to be organized by simple but powerful principles, which must
be consonant with the huge amount of hard-wired information processing? Our
sensory systems perform like this. For example, it would be easy to move furniture
(or Buildings) by manipulating an appropriately sized scale model, and easy to
observe the Effects by watching the model. However, the Fog could just as easily
have flooded the Room with 100 kHz sound and frequency-scaled the echoes down
into the human auditory range. A bat would have no trouble with this kind of "scale
model", but to Humans it’s just noise.

It will be necessary, in general, to arrange the overall control of the Fog to be

extremely distributed, as local as possible, robust in the presence of failure. When we
realize that single cubic inch of Fog represents a computer network of 16 million
processors, the Concept of hierarchical control with human oversight can be seen to

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
be hopelessly inadequate. Algorithmic distributed control algorithms offer one
possible solution.

Chapter 8

ADVANTAGES OF A UTILITY FOG

ENVIRONMENT

Another major advantage for space-filling Fog is safety. In a car (or its
nanotech Descendant) Fog forms a dynamic form-fitting cushion that protects better
than any seatbelt of nylon fibbers. 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.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 There are many more mundane 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 them 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
book case 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 analogues would be called into existence when needed and vanish
instead of having to be cleaned and put away.

Outside the home, the possibilities are, if anything, greater. One can easily
imagine "Industrial Fog" which forms a factory. It would consist of larger robots.
Unlike domestic Fog, which would have the density and strength of balsa wood,
industrial Fog could have bulk properties resembling hardwood or aluminium. 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.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 Chapter 9

APPLICATIONS

9.1 SPACE EXPLORATION

The major systems of spaceships will need to he made with special- purpose
Nanotechnological mechanisms, and indeed with such mechanisms pushed much
closer to their true capacities than anything we have talked about heretofore. In the
spaceship's Cabin, however, will be art acceleration couch. When not accelerating,
which is most of? The time, we’d prefer something useful, like empty space, there.
The Utility Fog makes a better acceleration couch, anyway.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 Fill the cabin with Utility Fog and never worry about floating out of reach of a
handhold. Instruments, consoles, and cabinets for equipment and sup plies are not
needed. Non simulable items can be embedded in the fog in what are apparently
bulkheads. The Fog can add great structural strength to the ship itself; the rest of the
structure needs not much More than a balloon. The same is true for spacesuits.

Fog inside the suit manages the air pressure and makes motion easy; Fog
outside gives extremely fine manipulating ability for various tasks. Of course, like the
ship, the suit contains many special purpose non-Fog mechanisms. Surround the space
station with Fog. It needs radiation shielding anyway (if the occupants are long-term);
use big Industrial Foglets with lots of redundancy in the mechanism; even so they
may get recycled fairly often. All the stock problems from SF movies go away:
humans never need go outside merely to fix something; when EVA is desired for
transfer or recreation, Outside Fog provides complete safety and motion control. It
also makes a good tugboat for docking spaceships.

Homesteaders on the Moon could bring along a batch of heavy duty Fog as
well as the Special-purpose nanotechnology power generation and waste recycling
equipment. There will be a million and one things, of the ordinary yet arduous
physical task kind, that must be done to set up and maintain a self-sufficient
household.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 Chapter 10

CONCLUSION

Utility fog is a term suggested by Dr. John Storrs Hall to describe a

nanotechnological Collection of tiny robots together performing a certain function
.Hall thought of it as nanotechnological replacement for car seatbelts and many other
useful types of equipment. The robots would be microscopic, with extending arms
reaching in several different directions, and could perform lattice reconfiguration.
Grabbers 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. Each foglet would have substantial computing power, and would be
able to communicate with its neighbours.

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 While the foglets would be micro-scale, construction of the foglets would
require full molecular technology. Each robot would be in the shape of a
dodecahedron with 12 arms extending outwards. Each arm would have four degrees
of freedom. When linked together the foglets would form an Octet truss. The foglets'
bodies would be made of Aluminium oxide rather than combustible diamond to avoid
creating fuel air explosives.

This Technology is going to have a very sound effect on future and the
researches are going on this technology to make it more compatible and sophisticated.
So in the future Of about twenty years from now it is expected to be in a very good
operating mode with Many of the flaws being eliminated and we could see the
wonders which can be done byte nanotechnology.

Chapter 11

REFERENCES

1. Eric Drexler - "Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and

Computation" Vol.1; 2002; pp.564-569

2. J Storrs Hall- “Towards Instant Manufacturing”

3. Rutgers – "Utility Fog- The Stuff that Dreams are made of": Vol.1;2005

4. Susan Stepney – “Scalable, (Non-) Evolvable, Emergent, Developmental

Nanotechnology”; 2003; pp.6-7.

5. Site : http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0220.html

6. Site : http://www.pivot.net/~jpierce/aspects_of_ufog.htm

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM
 7. Site : http://www.wildirisdesign.com/nano/ufog.html

8. Site: http://www. nanotech-now/utility-fog.htm

9. Journal:http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Authors/Computing/Hall-
JS/UFAUPS.html

DEPT. OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SCT COLLEGE OF

ENGINEERING,TRIVANDRUM