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Modular Robots 130

Posted by CmdrTaco from the which-module-plays-tony-hawk-3 dept.
levin writes "An article in the latest issue of IEEE spectrum discusses modular robots--robots made of small, identical components or modules. These robots can slither, roll like a tank tread, inchworm, or crawl like a spider. The idea is that modular robots will be not only cheaper to build because the modules are all the same, but will be more able to repair themselves (by shedding damaged modules). Even cooler, each of the 5cm cube modules in Xerox PARC's polybot sports its own PowerPC 555 and 1mb ram."
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Modular Robots More

Modular Robots

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  • Lazy (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by sandidge ( 150265 )
    Sounds like someone was behind on an article, looked at the Legos and their desk and started writing. :)
    • This has been on /. at least twice before (in earlier incarnations). I could only find one in the archives: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/09/13/233323 9&mode=thread [slashdot.org]

      This started as somebody's grad project. The idea is that you can mass produce the modules cheaply and they can be configured as needed for a specific task. I think the software is probably what is slowing them down...

    • Actually, there is a more appropriate toy. I couldn't remember the name, but after a lot of searching on the web, I found it's name. It was called Capsella, and it was around in either the late 1970s or the 1980s (or both). You bought a bunch of interconnecting parts (most looked like clear spheres with pipes coming out of them that had gears and stuff inside). You would then connect them to motorize your creation. This was before Lego Mind Storm, but Lego Mind Sotrm is far more complicated. The basic idea is the same as what they are trying to do with these robots. I always wanted one as a kid.

  • Expensive? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Marx_Mrvelous ( 532372 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @01:39PM (#2975057) Homepage
    Hmm.. the more that each module has to do, the more "expensive" that module becomes. Would these be more expensive, both in energy and $$, than just having specialized robots?

    • Re:Expensive? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by LordNimon ( 85072 )
      You'd be surprised how much costs can be reduced when something becomes mass-produced. Most of the construction cost comes from having to build different objects and then assembling them.
    • Not necessarily. Consider, say, a mission to Europa, or Mars. Space flight is still very expensive, and the price tag is direclty related to cost. It is quite conceivable that using a much more expensive modular robot that can reconfigure itself into a rover, drill, excavator, etc., will actually be CHEAPER to launch than a gaggle of single-purpose robots.

      In fact, the cost savings from the launch might well pay for the extra cost of the robot. Especially once modular robots are the de facto NASA standard and are cranked out in quantity by the lowest bidder. : )

    • Re:Expensive? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by inerte ( 452992 )
      Hmm.. the more that each module has to do, the more "expensive" that module becomes. Would these be more expensive, both in energy and $$, than just having specialized robots?

      Maybe. But the cool thing of modular design (such as in OOP) is reuse of components. You could define a 'walk' module, reusing in several different goals. And you would only need to engineer once this 'walk' module, thereby saving a lot on Research/Development, and on the machines that build the modules on factories.

  • Special (Score:2, Funny)

    by sysrequest ( 325177 )
    I can't wait until these things get mass-produced and more intelligent.

    Soon we'll have to hunt robot mosquitos and spiders with the fly swatter -- or possibly with a hammer if these damn things keep repairing themselves.
  • Anyone have any experience with cheap robotics that have fairly advanced AI? Or AI that can be reprogrammed and added to? What kind of cost is there for this type of system?
    • I think your question is a little vague. "... that have fairly advanced AI?" What does that mean? AI to do what? In my 3rd year of school we had to build robots that searched a maze, blew out a candle, and came home. It was a pretty smart robot. You could put ramps in the hallways, change the room after he finds the candle, or put 3 candles in a room.

      What application are you looking for in regards to AI? Its highly doubtful AI will ever get to a point where you just install an EEPROM, turn it on, and the "thing" figures out why it is there.
      • By advances, I was talking in general. Is there any type of systems developed for consumers that can make decisions based on outside input and make physical reactions based upon a large set of rules or guidelines. The generalized question was to ask if there were any robots or mechanized devices that can be purchased at affordable prices(
        Beyond your average "Programmed to go towards light, then programmed to bark" kind of robot you described.
    • Lego Mindstorms. The physical sensors are rather limited though. Touch (A button pretty much) Heat, (Thermometer) Light, (Detects brightness) Rotation. Limitations aside, ive seen some really impressive things hacked out with these little bots. (A copying machine for one)
      • What kind of prices do we need for a simple Mindstorms kit? Are they actually decent? What kind of OS and interface is needed to interface with the system's programming and design?

        I am guessing proprietary windows software... right?
        • Nope, if youve got a serial port you can develop on em pretty much.
        • They cost ~£150 (or atlest thats how much I paied when they first came out)
          They are pritty cool, and by default you can make some niffty stuff (like RADAR's). See the website, or the back of the box for actual content.

          You need a serial port (Mac users think USB to serial port atapter).
          To develop "applications" for them, either use
          The Stuff That They Come With (crappy, aimmed for kids)
          VB, or other OCX-enabled Windows Delopement System

          Not Quite C [enteract.com], aviable on most plateforms, including UNIX (and alikes (Linux)), Win32, BeOS [geocities.com] and MacOS. As the auther of the BeOS port, I can say it's piss easy to port if you need to.

          LegOS [www.noga.de], A miniOS for the RCX, looks pritty darn cool.

          leJOS [sourceforge.net], Java RCX [escape.com] and tinyVM [sourceforge.net] for Java based interfaces.

          mlk
  • an interest in robots or something? This is like the 50th story today on robots. Ok, second, but still.

    Quick breakdwn of robot topics lately:

    microscopic robots
    tiny robots that can move in different ways
    robots designed to kill other robots
    as well as the 3 or 4 AI articles, and a few others I didn't bother to read.

    Maybe....

    News for Scientists, Stuff for Robots?

    ok, this comment was posted in jest, so don't get your robots in a wad.

  • Haven't you all seen that show "Cubix- Robots for Everyone" on the WB?

  • Nano-bots, Cellular AI, oh my. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by maniac11 ( 88495 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @01:47PM (#2975105) Homepage Journal
    These, like cells in a human body, are few in type but many in number. Such robots are called n-modular systems (where n is the number of module types).

    The 'imagine a beowulf cluster' comments are more applicable here than in most of the articles I read... Imagine billions of robots able to work in tandem, infinitely reconfigurable. An office building/space craft? An automobile/boat. Hello Transformers...

  • Cyberdyne Systems (Score:3, Funny)

    by ipxodi ( 156633 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @01:47PM (#2975107) Homepage
    >>Modular reconfigurable robots are built up from tens to hundreds, and potentially millions, of modules.
    Millions of modules? Like molecules? Can you say "liquid metal alloy?"

    Damn, I hope the company doesn't start calling itself "Cyberdyne".....

  • Ack! Replicators! (Score:5, Funny)

    by RandomCoil ( 88441 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @01:49PM (#2975120)
    I don't think making these things is such a good idea. TV has taught us that they will eventually take over a Russian submarine and almost destroy Thor's home world.

    What, you didn't see "Small Victories" [stargate-sg1.com] from the fourth season of Stargate SG1?

  • Get a modular robot in robo-wars. The chainsaws, flippers, and spinners wouldn't have a chance against something self-repairing and configuring.

  • The rules [battlebotsiq.com] for BattleBots specificly mention "polybots" (aka a modular robot). However, I can only remember seeing one robot a few seasons ago that used such a design, and it didn't do too well.

    The rules for polybots go like this:

    • You have to show the ability to put the robot back together (without getting in there and doing it with your hands)
    • The robot is KOed when 50% or more of the peices are incapacitated.
    • If you have different configurations, your robot must meet the weight requirement in all its possible configurations

    I believe there is also a rule that only two people on your team are allowed to be by the arena for driving, which will limit the number of peices that can be manualy controled. (I'm not sure about that rule, though).

    There are also practical considerations to when taking the third rule into account. Imagine bringing in your highly-modular robot and telling the judges that your bot has a total of 2^32 possible configurations, and it must be weighed in all of them. The best thing to do in this circumstance is to call up the judges before the tourny and ask them if the bot can just be weighed in the configuration you're about to send into the arena. Bots are reweighed before each fight anyways, so this shouldn't be a problem.

    Anybody have ideas for a good polybot?

    • A lot of the robots appear to have more communications difficulties than anything - either they were never tested at sufficient distance from the controllers, or else their antennae seem to be the first to go. A fully-autonomous bot with sufficient redundant sensors and the ability to hunt down other robots on its own would be a great advantage, I would think. The robot wars arms race is pretty quiet recently, since most of the really good weapons designs have been figured out and the only question is implementation. I predict that robot intelligence (at least enough to assist the human controllers) will be the next winning strategy.

  • Possibilities. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Hiro Antagonist ( 310179 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @01:55PM (#2975160) Journal
    This opens up quite a number of doors in the robotics industry; as each new module can [potentially] add processing power to the chain -- making the robot even more capable. Furthermore, as long as the interfaces between modules are kept consistant, it would be possible to engineer special modules for specialized tasks, which only adds to the versatility of the robot.

    It's kind of like having industrial-grade legos.
  • This is where it all starts... robots that can make more robots... add a pinch of AI and next thing you know we're all being used for energy farms....

    oh well, I doubt these robots will stand up against a shotgun blast, so if I see any little cubic robots near my house... BOOM!

  • But I thought... (Score:1, Redundant)

    by inerte ( 452992 )
    ... That this was what Lego is for? Build large structures of smaller components.
  • but I guess I missed it. What would these things be used for? I mean, in the article it said they would be able to traverse difficult terrain, etc., but we already have robots that can do that.

    This is a serious question, What the hell would they be used for? Did someone see that in the article or somewhere else?

    • The article mentioned exploring other planets or searching earthquake zones. Such environments often require something that can adapt quickly to changing circumstances.

    • Sexbots would be expensive; if you get bored with one, your only alternative would be to go buy a new one, which would be costly. But with modular sexbots, you can save money and just go buy a new head module, personality module, arms, legs, and other sundry body parts. I'd be much cheaper than having to buy an entirely new sexbot.

      I'd invest in the company that produces these...

  • They could get the price down to something reasonable. They wouldn't need the uber processors in each module either, just something cheap. I'd love to play around with something like this, and be able to go and pick-up a few extra modules whenever I needed/wanted. It would be great for experimenting.

  • Frightening possibilities... (Score:4, Funny)

    by stokes ( 148512 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @02:02PM (#2975212)
    Consider first that the CPU in these machines is of the same family as a Power Macintosh. Then consider the jointed arm that the latest iMac employs to support the screen. I can see a future model of Mac that not only smiles at you when you boot it up, but tries to hug you as well.

  • Life more like Battletech (Score:2, Interesting)

    by To0n ( 256520 )
    Ok, so I'm probably going to be pointing a giant neon sign at my head that reads "NERD!" but, back when I was into table top RPG's, Battletech in particular, There was a segment of the Battletech universe called "The Clans" which had mechs that had modular weapons. Meaning, all you had to do was supposidly slide in and out the weapons for configuration. Now in actual game play, this didn't really show up (Gameplay being much more cooler when Mech's have an individual shape - Mad Cat as opposed to a Thor for those of you that played the video games) but it is just a little bit of background factoid which runs similar with the story

    • Yeah, the Transformers had interchangeable weapons too. At least until they started making the holes in their fists slightly different sizes :(

    • Well, I know we're wandering Off-Topic here, but...

      (Also, I'm snatching that NERD sign from you and running head-long into the crossfire.)

      The idea was that the shape of the robot was still unique (Light, Medium, Heavy, arms, legs, etc) but the robot contained "bays" for weapons and engine modules.

      Anyways, back to the topic.

      Modular robot design is actually a pretty good idea. First off, you could get the cost savings of scale/quantity, second you avoid the "puprose-built" robot problem.

      I think a tool like this would be more useful in hazardous environments and unknown areas. Suppose we want our next robot explorer for Mars, sending a self-reconfigurable robot might be a better idea. We don't know exactly what we'd encounter and we can adjust for strange things. This would also be useful in contaminated areas where you don't want to get three special robots ruined or send someone in to modify the one already there.

      ...Now if we could just cram a CPU, battery, and connections into a swiss army knife and download the McGyver AI program...

  • 1mb of RAM? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @02:05PM (#2975235) Homepage
    Hrmmm, interesting. They can program a module that's self aware, knows when a module connected to it is damaged and is capable of repairing that module. Plus fulfilling it's mission requirements, and all in 1mb of RAM.....

    So why does my PC need 128mb just to type a Word document without crashing?
  • ...I've been doing this with LEGO Mindstorms for a couple of years now.
  • ... the Christmas tree robot in Robert Forward's "The Flight of the Dragonfly". Dr. Hans Moravec designed it [islandone.org] for Dr. Forward, and it has since been used in several other novels by other authors.
  • These could be really useful for
    modular manufacturing processes.

    Imagine an assembly line of really cheap
    robots that can build stuff cheaper in America
    than the cost of shipping "made in China" stuff back here. To compete against dirt cheap labor,
    we basically need to have dirt cheap robots.

    If these things are cheap enough, I may just be
    able to win my bet to be able to build a [kettering.edu]
    shell script controlled CD changer for my Linux box for under $50.00

  • But when... (Score:2, Funny)

    by sharkey ( 16670 )
    Are we going to get Constructicons? I want Devastator to do my bidding!

  • Spliting and Merging (Score:5, Insightful)

    by regen ( 124808 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @02:19PM (#2975337) Homepage Journal
    Something that they really don't talk about in the article is spliting and merging robots. They talk about reconfiguration of a single robot, but I think spliting and merging with a group of robot would be very interesting.

    Imagine a robot being able to break a portion of itself off and send it to perform a sub task. Imagine two robot getting together to cooperate on a task by combining and spliting apart again once the task was completed.

    • Cooperative robots were studied earlier.

      The idea was to create a lot of small relatively stupid robots that could somehow self-coordinate (be it one brain bot or something). Imagine a bunch of ant-sized lifter bots coordinating and lifting and moving a heavy object. The heavier the object, the more "assistants" would get called in to do the task.
    • If you dig through the Second generation movie archives these robots actually simulate such reconfigurations.
    • You may want to check check out marsupial robotics. [computer.org]
    • In his "Rocheworld" series Robert L. Forward describes a robot that did just that, called the Christmas Bush.

      From a core body it had six arms, these branched into six fingers each, which themselves branched likewise until reaching near-microscopic size. Each segment had a power store, motor, and limited processing capability. Power, communications, and senses were driven by laser diodes giving the machine a colored, sparkly appearance (hence the name), and it was operated remotely by the habitat's supercomputer, relying on its own processors for simple reflex behavior.

      A pretty cool machine it was; it'd be quite an accomplishment to build something like it in real life.

  • Stanford's Modular Bot: Polypod! (Score:4, Informative)

    by advtech ( 176011 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @02:22PM (#2975361) Homepage
    For more information on modular robots, and the 1993 research done at Stanford University on polypod, the bot that preceeded Xerox PARC's polybot, visit The Edge Report [edgereport.com], which has posted a brief follow-up to the Slashdot article.

    Direct link to the story is:
    http://www.edgereport.com/article.php?sid=138 [edgereport.com]

    --

  • Power requirements? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PantyChewer ( 557598 ) on Friday February 08, 2002 @02:23PM (#2975364)
    They talk about systems of up to 1 million of these modules. 1 million processors is gonna suck up a hell of a lot of power not to mention the motors etc. Its gonna generate a lot of heat too, where is the power for these things supposed to come from if they are supposed to be used for plant exploration and stuff?

    • Well, I've not read the entire article, but one solution would be to put the energy one module needs into the module itself. If you need more endurance, just put a few idle modules somewhere which will give their energy to the others. Putting idle modules could be useful for other purposes too, such as backup and ballast (to lower the center of gravity etc).

      For the heat problem I guess the one million module monster won't be a 100x100x100 module cube, but a large structure with lot of space.

    • That is a pretty good question. In the likely uses for these things only a few motors will run at any one time, with the rest of the modules just maintaining a locked position. So they'd better design them so they can lock in position without a continuous power draw.

      Power-PC CPU's draw a lot less power than Pentiums (I think), but it's not going to be practical to have portable-powered units (solar, battery, fuel cell, or combination) with large numbers of them. They also built a chain robot with PIC CPU's -- that's an 8 bitter that draws a little more current than a digital watch. It could follow a pre-programmed plan but couldn't re-configure itself, and probably isn't brainy enough to handle unpredictability. So I expect a real world modular bot will be a lot of PIC "muscle" units, plus a few high-powered "brains". The PIC's will have just enough intelligence to follow the plan sent out by the brains, and not burn up much power when idling.

      The lab model (powered by a wall plug) might put a "brain" in every unit, to make it easier to work out the basic motions. Then you compile that to PIC object code add it to the list of options the brain can activate.
    • Using off-the-shelf AAA (!!) NiMH bateries, they get distances of 0.5 km / 45 minutes of continous operation.

      Cheers
  • They finally brought the Soda Constructor to life!
  • Looks like we're one step closer to these nasties [amandatapping.qnet.pl].

    (FYI - This is a the "replicator" from Stargate: SG-1)

  • I have seen this episode of star-gate.....

    oh no.. they are alive... run for the hills... run for the
  • With these modules it would be easy to simulate those robots with a genetic algorithm. This way the compilation of modules which fits the task best is computed.
    A simliar approach to that is the golem project [brandeis.edu]
    Imagine you set the task to build a house and the robots that fulfil it best are copied with slight mutations. Then the simulation starts again until you have the perfect housbuilder robots.
  • The best UI people on the planet are those working in the car industry.

    So people that brought us spoilers and racing stripes should be designing my OS?
  • If it turns out to be an incarnation of the robots from Screamers, I call first dibbs on the patent to the heartbeat shield thingies. And total rights to the distibution of them.
  • Polybots, transform and roll out!

    I know it's dumb, I just couldn't help myself. =)

  • off-topic. (not goatsx, please don't censor to -1) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08, 2002 @03:12PM (#2975682)
    These are robots, not computers.
    But imagine what you could do with a 5 cm^3 computer if it were a self-powered cube that could automatically share number-crunching resources with any other cube it got connected with.
    Specifically, I address in this off-topic post the feasability of simulating the human brain with current technology.
    Before we start, see here for the statistics [mit.edu] I am using.
    Note especially that:
    1. the brain runs at a MAXIMUM of 2,000 Hz in any given part of it. (A neuron cannot fire more frequently).
    2. There are 20,000,000,000 (twenty u.s. billion) Neurons in the adult brain. (With an upper bounds of 50 ubillion in some estimates.).
    3. Each neuron is connected to 2,000-5,000 other neurons.
    4. The greatest frequency with which an individual neuron can fire is 250-2000 hertz. (Estimates vary).

    I'll now interpret this information.
    Let's posit for a second (wrongly) that a five hundred megahertz computer ("PowerPC 555" in article, though again the article refers to robots, not mere number-crunching computers) could simulate with each hertz all that a neuron does in one firing. (By contrast, a typical "hertz" in today's gigahertz computers is less than required to retrieve two thirty-two bit numbers, add them, and store the result.)
    With this assumption, we'd only need (upper estimate) 200,000 such processors [1] to simulate the brain real-time.

    200,000 * 5 cubic centimeters (size of these suckers) is 1,000,000 cubic centimeters, or 100 centimeters to each side of a cube, which is 1 cubic meter.
    That's not very big at all, and even if these robots cost $2,000 each, 200,000 of them would only cost $400 million.
    The problem, of course, is that no way one hertz on these babies is going to simulate all that a neuron does, even on average, since each neuron is connected to up to 5,000 other neurons, and has a small interaction with each one each time it fires.
    Since a 32-bit integer can enumerate ("address") just over 4 billion items, we would need an integer and another byte (we'd only use half) to address each of the other 50 billion neurons. In other words, just to pass information about which current connection we're looking at we need to handle two 4-byte integers and another byte on each end of your dendrite (connector and connectee). If we assume that an "interaction" between two neurons, when one of them fires, takes a hundred real hertz to process (I think this is fair, since the amount of logical information that a neuron stores can be represented by two or three variables, which you'd read, compare, see if a threshold is met, then store), then we'd need not one hertz per neuron but 100 hertz * 5000 dendrites (connections to other neurons with which it transacts). Our 1 cubic meter has just jumped to 500,000 (five cubic kilometers), and our $400 million price-tag has just jumped to $20 trillion.
    But $20 trillion will buy you the processing power (not necessarily the io bandwidth) to process as much as the human brain can possibly, ever process, if every neuron is connected to as many other neurons as it possibly can, and each one is firing as much as it biologically can, by the highest estimate anyone estimates, and is connected to as many other neurons as anyone estimates is possible.
    Needless to say, your actual costs for doing as much processing as the human brain processes are much, much lower.
    Why, if you take simply the fact that the max hertz we calculated as 2000, whereas the "max" is 250-2,000, and the "average" by most estimates is around 20 hertz (a neuron, on average, will not fire more than twenty times a second), you've just reduced your processing time by a factor of 100, going from $20 trillion back down to $200 billion.
    Now let's look at the difference between the "processing" that we said we can buy for $2000 (500 megahertz) and the io bandwidth we need.
    We estimated 100 hertz per neuron interaction with another neuron, and we said that a neuron was connected with 5000 other neurons, and that the "state" of each connection could be represented (logically) by three 32-bit integers (four bytes each) and another 5 bytes just to address the second neuron, we now need 8 bytes * 5,000 neurons available over the timespan of 100 hertz, where we're looking at a 500 megahertz computer. This means that to get the io bandwidth over one second, we multiply these eight bytes by 5,000,000 (the quotient of 500 megahertz and 100 hertz), and get 40 million / 1024*1024 = 38.14 megabytes/second.
    If we forget about the 5-cm cubes (and any semblance of topicality) this actually isn't so unreasonable, since a $2000 computer needing only 500 megahertz shouldn't have any problem with 38.13 megs/second. Or 4 gigs of RAM.
    Anyway, let me know where my numbers are off, but it seems I've concluded that, today, $200 billion will buy you everything you need to simulate a human brain real-time, without any compression or special optimization.
    So then next time somebody says: "Computer will never think, because only human can think." You can proudly answer:
    "Shut your face, ignorant person. Soon as we figure out all the laws of neural interaction and find a way to image someone's brain, $1.57 billion dollars will buy you all the computer processing you need to simulate that brain real-time. [10.5 years from now, or 7 Moore's law iterations -- I divided $200 billion by two to the seventh]. But, of course, if ten and a half years to you is longer than "never", then feel free to remain ignorant, moron."

    ac.
    of course, I've been known to be wrong. please correct me gently.
    [1] this is 50 billion divided by 250,000, since 500 megahertz is 250,000 more frequent than 2,000 hertz.
  • What's this [slashdot.org] then?

  • Fractal robots (Score:2, Interesting)

    by the_consumer ( 547060 )
    Here's [demon.co.uk] a guy with even grander ideas along these lines. Crackpot or genius? Take a look and decide for yourself....
  • Soon they'll start producing these bots 5 nanometers on a side. Then we'll be in trouble!!!!
  • ...to come up with the idea of building robots from interchangable modular parts. Lego [lego.com] hasn't quite managed to stick a PowerPC in each block, but they're much more affordable.
    Seriously, it's nice to see things moving from the toy department to the research lab, instead of the other way around.

    This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
  • Did anyone else notice that on the polybot demo page, there's something quite disturbing in the Obstacle Course video? As this evil-looking metallic snake traverses a variety of terrains, the man grinning evilly as he takes notes is wearing camo. I shudder to think what he was imagining.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I can see a wonderfully simple interfacing among the robotic parts. I would really like to see these controlled with embedded java to allow you to say go(NW,1000 * FT); to treads, feet or wheels, and the robot goes 1000 ft northwest. The possibilites are endless for a large amount of sophistication internal to the modules, while keeping a simple interface.
  • playbot magazine?

    QED

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