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?

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.