UTILTY FOG

A SEMINAR REPORT

Submitted by
ABHINAV ARVIND

in partial fulfillment of requirement of the Degree

of

Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech)

IN

COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

COCHIN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

KOCHI- 682022

SEPTEMBER 2008
 DIVISION OF COMPUTER SCIENCE & ENGINEERING
SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
COCHIN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
KOCHI-682022

Certificate

Certified that this is a bonafide record of the seminar report titled

“UTILITY FOG”
done by
ABHINAV ARVIND
of VIIth semester Computer Science & Engineering in the year 2008 in partial
fulfillment of requirement for the Degree of Bachelor of Technology in
Computer Science & Engineering of Cochin University of Science and
Technology.

Ms. Vini Vijayan Dr. David Peter S.

Seminar Guide Head of Division

Date :
 Acknowledgement

At the outset, I thank the Lord Almighty for the grace, strength and hope to make
my endeavor a success.

I also express my gratitude to Dr. David Peter, Head of the

Department and for providing me with adequate facilities, ways and means by which I
was able to complete this seminar. I express my sincere gratitude to him for his constant
support and valuable suggestions without which the successful completion of this
seminar would not have been possible.

I thank Ms. Vini Vijayan, my seminar guide for her boundless

cooperation and helps extended for this seminar. I express my immense pleasure and
thankfulness to all the teachers and staff of the Department of Computer Science and
Engineering, CUSAT for their cooperation and support.

Last but not the least, I thank all others, and especially my
classmates and my family members who in one way or another helped me in the
successful completion of this work.

ABHINAV ARVIND
.
 ABSTRACT

Nanotechnology is the use of nanometer-sized particles in ways that employ novel or

unusual properties with limitless possibilities. 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(Storrs Hall 2001). 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 allow for foglets to grip together

and thus form 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.

I
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter No. Title Page No.

List of Figures…………………………………………………...III
1 Introduction....................................................................................1
2 Behind the scene............................................................................4
2.1 The Stuffs that Dreams are made of ...............................4
2.2 Modes of operation..........................................................6
3 How to Build a Fog........................................................................8
3.1 Design Issues.....................................................................8
3.2 Utility Fog: The components proposed.............................10
3.2.1 A Foglet ......................................................................14
3.2.2 The grip .....................................................................15
3.3 Foglets in detail................................................................16
3.3.1 Foglets – internal schematic ......................................18
4. Communication and Control...........................................................20
5. Combination with other technologies.............................................22
6. General properties and uses............................................................24
7. Limitations of utility fog capability...............................................25
7.1 Other desirable limitations...............................................26
8. Advantages of an utility fog environment.....................................28
9. Applications ...................................................................................29
9.1 Space Exploration............................................................29
10. Conclusion.....................................................................................30
11. References......................................................................................31

II
 List of Figures

No. NAME PAGE No.

2.1 The expansion of a foglet..........................................................................5
2.2.1 Arrangement of Utility Fog.......................................................................7
3.2.1 Foglet having 12 arms.............................................................................10
3.3.1 Connecting Structure Of a Foglet............................................................14
3.2.2 The Grip Of a Foglet................................................................................15
3.3.1 Internal Diagram of a Foglet....................................................................18
3.3.2 Three layers of foglets..............................................................................19

III
UTILITY FOG

1.Introduction

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-micron robotic 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 Holodeck 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.

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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.

The color 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 color
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 "eyephones" 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

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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.

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2.BEHIND THE SCENE

2.1 The Stuffs 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.” 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
nanobots 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 its not being there. Hall
describes a detailed scenario 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 who
is 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 walk
through dumb-matter walls. Of course Fog people can walk through Fog walls, too.”

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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, 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

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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 a
table, 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 display would contain about a
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 the
air 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

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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 effector 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, analyzed, 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.

Fig.2.2.1 Arrangement of Utility Fog.

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UTILITY FOG

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.

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 size
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 100
microns, 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 by
having 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

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UTILITY 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 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 a self-reproducing assemblers . Assembler will be most efficient when they work in
a 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.

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,
and Fog-making-machine making machines but Fog-making-machine-making-machine-
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.

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UTILITY FOG

3.2Utility Fog: The components proposed

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

Fig.3.2.1 Foglet having 12 arms.

Most currently proposed nanotechnological designs are based on carbon. Carbon is a

marvelous atom for structural purposes, forming a crystal (diamond) as shown in fig
3.2.1 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 aluminum oxide, a refractory compound using

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common elements. The structural elements form an exoskeleton, which besides being a
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. 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-centered 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 tetrahredrons
and octahedrons) and 3 minor ones (corresponding to tire face-centered cube faces). In
each of the 4 major orientations, each Foglet uses six arms to hold its neighbors in the
layer; layers are thus a 2-dimensionally rigid fabric of equilateral triangles. In face-

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centered mode, the layers work out to he 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 to prevent
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.

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 them selves along. Thus for a 100-micron interlayer
distance Fog can sustain a 100 meter-per-second shear per millimeter 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 arms 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

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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 to
the 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 of
five. (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 inter-
penetrating 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 a
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 roughly the same
precision those properties are measured by human senses. The major exceptions are taste,
smell, and transparency. The latter an be overcome with holographic "eyephones" if a
person is to be completely embedded in Fog.

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3.2.1 A Foglet
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 Foglet

As 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 are used for tight combination of two arms of
different foglets.

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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.

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3.3 Foglets In Details

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 some thing 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 thou sand times per second.
Now if each of those motions were dissipative, and the fog were under full load, it would
need to consume 700 kilowatts per cubic centimeter. This is roughly the power
dissipation in a .45 caliber 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 the hydrogen.

I should hasten to add that almost never would one expect the Fog to move actively at
1000 psi; the pressure in the column of Fog beneath, say, a "levitated" human body is
less 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

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exploratory engineering designs for electric motors have power conversion densities up
to a billion watts per cubic centimeter, and dissipative inefficiencies in the 10 parts per
million range. This means that if time Empire State Building were being floated around
on a column of Fog, time Fog would dissipate less than a watt per cubic centimeter.

Moving Fog will dissipate energy by air turbulence and viscous drag. In the large, air
will be entrained 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 wavingof 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.

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3.3.1 Foglets – Internal Schematic

The figure 3.3.1 shows the internal diagram of a foglet which is the basic component of a
utlity 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.

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The Foglets arrange themselves in three layers where they slide over one another to form
a new structure as shown in Fig. 3.3.2 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 a
liquid. If you allow the sum of the arm extensions to vary with the sum of the forces
on 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 to
near vacuum.

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4. COMMUNICATIONS AND CONTROL

In the macroscopic world, microcomputer-based controllers (e.g. the widely used Intel
8051 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 a
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 logic
in less than one tenth of one percent 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 a
RISC design allows a single processor to control a 100 kHz arm; using auxiliary
controllers will let it do all 12 easily.

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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 cubic meter,
this is a few kilowatts per cubic meter. Cooling for such a dissipation must needs he
sonic-where between substantial and heroic. As long as the computers can go into a
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 tradeoffs of the macroscopic world: routing of a
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.

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5. COMBINATION WITH OTHER TECHNOLOGIES

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 more true when we consider nano-engineered
macroscopic mechanisms. We could imagine a robot, human-sized, that was formed of a
collection of nano-engineered parts held together by a mass of Utility Fog. The parts
might include "bones", perhaps diamond-fiber 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 waterproofness, solar energy
collection, and resistance to general abuse, far exceeding that which ordinary general
purpose Fog would liave. (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 telepresence.

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 different

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reasons 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 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.

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6.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, no roads of asphalt, no 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 a
certain 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 all our physical possessions
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
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 (with the caveats below).

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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 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 couldnot 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 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 a
pair 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.

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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.

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 may
be 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.

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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 per form. 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 over all control of the Fog to be extremely
distributed, as local as possible, robust in the presence of failure. When we realize that a
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 be hopelessly
inadequate. Agoric distributed control algorithms offer one possible solution.

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8. ADVANTAGES OF AN 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 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 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
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 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 any thing, 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 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.

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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.

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 em bedded 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 re
cycled 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.

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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 a
nanotechnological replacement for car seatbelts and many other useful equipments. 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 neighbors.

While the foglets would be micro-scale, construction of the foglets would require full
molecular technology. Each bot 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 a 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 by
the nanotechnology.

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11.REFERENCES

1. http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0220.html
2. http://www.pivot.net/~jpierce/aspects_of_ufog.htm
3. http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Authors/Computing/Hall-JS/UFAUPS.html
4. http://www.wildirisdesign.com/nano/ufog.html

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