This company plans to grow armies of drones in giant tubs of chemicals
Happy almost Independence Day, America, now prepare to witness the impending doom stalking humanity in the form of drones that are "grown" from chemical compounds. Yes, really.
Evoking images from the liquid metal and nearly unstoppable Terminator from the movies, BAE Systems has posted concept video footage of a process to create drones of the future.
"A radical new machine called a Chemputer could enable advanced chemical processes to grow aircraft and some of their complex electronic systems, conceivably from a molecular level upwards," reads the description on the company's website.
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The video shows a drone being produced in a large vat of chemicals and then moved to a staging area where a robotic arm inserts what are, presumably, the drone's engine components. Sure this is just a concept, but BAE Systems has a track record of turning concepts into reality, so this isn't just another concept video promising unlikely inventions.
"We have been developing routes to digitize synthetic and materials chemistry … with minimal human assistance."
"We have been developing routes to digitize synthetic and materials chemistry and at some point in the future hope to assemble complex objects in a machine from the bottom up, or with minimal human assistance," said professor Nick Colosimo, a BAE Systems global engineering fellow in a statement on the company's website.
"Creating small aircraft would be very challenging but I’m confident that creative thinking and convergent digital technologies will eventually lead to the digital programming of complex chemical and material systems."
The next obvious step would be humanoid robots produced by the "chemputer," and then science fiction will have officially predicted reality — again.
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