The full archive is in a difficult to navigate scanned form, which is difficult to link to or search, however some of the later articles are available as text.  However the archive includes lots of interesting stuff.  For example, Dana Meadows famous article on where to intervene in a system there.  Other interesting bits include articles by ecologists such as HT Odum, Paul Ehrlich, and Buzz Holling as well as an issue focused on scenario planning.

A former editor, Kevin Kelly, writes on his website.

The Whole Earth Catalogs preached the hacker/designer approach to life starting in 1968, decades before this lifehacking became the norm. The Catalogs were a paper-based database offering thousands of hacks, tips, tools, suggestions, and possibilities for optimizing your life.

Like fine wine, the back issues of the Whole Earth Catalogs and its offspring, the CoEvolution Quarterly improve with age. One can read 20-year-old back issues and they will inform and astound you. They feel as if they were written yesterday. I’ve noted previously that much of their charm comes because they were blogs created in newsprint, written before the internet.

Related posts:

1. What Drives Humanity’s Footprint on the Earth?
2. Tipping Points in the Earth System – an icon of climate change?
3. Biocultural Conservation at the end of the earth merits 2008 SPES Award

Propelled by flexible, electrically driven tentacles, robotic jellyfish swim at the Hannover Fair.

Using a type of “swarm intelligence,” the Festo company’s so-called AquaJellies set their own courses and can come together or avoid each other as needed. The robots “talk” via light pulses underwater and via radio at the surface.

On Technium Kevin Kelly writes:

One one level, these autonomous robotic jelly fish illuminated the mechanism by which real jellyfish swim. … The parallels in their motions — clearly visible in the video — feel so organic that we immediately assign them life-like adjectives.

I think we are primed to find lifelikeness in machines. E.O. Wilson calls it our biophilia — our intense attraction to living things. As we design machines to approach the complexity of organisms and mimic their behavior (as these do), we will be very quick to include them in our love.

A series of video of the companies Aqua and Air Jellies are on the company’s website.

AirJellyAquaJelly
Design News describes these robots in more detail:

Their tentacle construction takes its cues from the functional anatomy of some fish fins. These bio-inspired tentacles consist of two flexible external surfaces connected by a series of internal ribs. When one of the surfaces is put under tension, the entire tentacle bends in the direction of the applied force — a phenomenon that Festo calls the “fin ray effect.”

Festo uses an electric drive, geared power transmission and linkages to actuate the tentacles. Alternating tension between the two external surfaces creates a wave-like motion that propels the robots through the water or air. Fischer describes the resulting movement as “peristaltic” since the waving tentacles seem to move by something like muscle contractions.

Whether they swim or fly, these two types of jellyfish steer themselves by carefully controlled weight shifts. As Fischer explains, their bodies contain a servo-driven swash plate connected to a four-armed pendulum that changes their center of gravity. “The pendulum shifts their weight, and they move in a new direction,” he says.

And for the AquaJelly in particular, that new direction is determined autonomously. This underwater robot guides itself with the help of a sensor array, communications systems and control software based on robotic swarm-intelligence. Fischer notes, for example, multiple AquaJelly robots can avoid each other in the water, using light sensors to pick up the presence of their tank mates. They also have pressure sensors that allow them to gauge their depth within a few mm.

AquaJelly robots also manage their own battery-charging behavior. They communicate with an in-tank charging dock wirelessly via ZigBee, for example, to make sure the dock isn’t occupied when they need to charge.

According to Fischer, giving these robots such a high degree of autonomy required a mechatronic approach in which the mechanical design, sensor engineering and control software were all developed concurrently. “Even simple autonomy is not so simple,” he says.

Related posts:

1. Short Links: Gorillas, drunky shrews, and jellyfish
2. Designing Resilient Software?