Co-Evolving Robots At Brandeis

neck jones pointed out this site titled "Towards Fully Automated Design of Real Robots" at the Brandeis Dynamic & Evolutionary Machine Organization Lab which dropped my jaw. As neck says: "Whoah." Anyone who can summarize their work by beginning "Start with a set of simple bodies and set of random brains" and go on to describe automated, automatic fused depositon manufacturing already has my attention.

Comments

Automated whose-it what's?

[tcd004]

This will be really cool till Linda Hamilton crushes it in a hydraulic press.

tcd004

Here's my Microsoft parody, where's yours?

Other related stuff of interest.

[Matt2000]

This type of work is definately interesting and has produced some good results. If you are interested, definately check out the references at the bottom of the page, they are some of the defining work in this area. For your convenience I've linked up a few here (for some reason they're not linked from the actual site):

Karl Sims stuff

His Original Paper
Some cool pictures and more links

That should get you started.


Hotnutz.com - Funny

Try it yourself

[chuck]

The whole simulation of robots angle reminded me of this site: http://sodaplay.com/.

It's a java applet where you can design some silly little robots in 2-D, and see how you can make 'em work. No neural networks, or real-world synthesis, but hey, it's cool!

U of D Spring Lecture Series

[Life Blood]

I'm a Univ of Delaware Mech Engineering grad student and we had a talk on this from a related researcher earlier this year. It has some cool potential in a lot of areas, but also some strong disadvantages.

Basically a modular robot is cool in that it can adapt to situtations, have redundacy in case a module fails, etc. Makes for a great exploration units.

The main problem with them is that they're a bitch to control. The processing demands rise with the square of the number of modules, so they get sluggish pretty darn fast. They also are more inefficient than a committed robot and can have problems with local weaknesses. Basically a bad configuration can easily overload one module and cause failure of the whole robot. Preventing that takes even more processor time to test possible configurations, creating a wicked cycle.