A 4x4 array of nitinol-actuated forced oscillator antennae was constructed during the summer of 1998 in the Adaptive Systems Laboratory. The array was initially intended to be a sessile robot colony. Each robot consists of a muscle and an antennae. The weighted antenna is a forced oscillator driven by the nitinol muscle.
Robots communicate when their antennae touch, forming intermittent noisy serial links.
However, as the machine took shape, we realized that it was a more general type of computing device, with true physical randomness introduced by transmission noise, and chaotic behavior realized by the forced oscillator antennae that perturb each others paths. All of these experiments could be conducted on a digital computer, but without the randomness and non-algorithmic chaos of this machine.