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The Robot Diaries
I enjoyed reading the robot diaries which are an account of building some BEAM [?] robots from kits. BEAM bots are interesting in that the design sense behind it is much more building from the ground-up (IE, build a robot to resemble an insect) rather then trying to build from the top down. Basically a more evolutionary approach to things.
Comedy central. Battlebots. My dream machines.
I am !amused.
http://www.robotfrank.com/Diary.html
GO ROBOT RON!
"Futurists speculate that robots will soon clean our houses and baby-sit our kids."
I don't think I'd want a robot baby-sitting my kids, The whole time I was reading the article I just kept thinking AI and the matrix.
"They will run factories and fight in wars."
So we teach 'em how to fight then let them baby-sit. Good idea? I think not. And would there be MS robots I'd hate for us to lose a war because the robot blue screened.
"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows." -Aristotle Onassis
Article mentions Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, which is a lot of fun and very offbeat.
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Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
I'm not sure developing robots through evolution is a good thing. If they're evolutionary scale follows Moore's law instead of natural evolutionary scales, they could evolve into new species in years, instead of hundreds of thousands of years.
If they're evolving, we may not be able to control what they want to do. If we design robots ourselves, we can add safeguards to protect humanity (like Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics). If htey just evolve, who know what may happen, they may decide we are competition for resources and get rid of us.
I think Bill Joy made quite a few good points about this.
I think it would be amusing to create one of these BEAM bots with the sole mission of keeping a 1 meter distance between itself and any other object. Then you put it into Battlebot competition. No one controls it, and all it does is run.
I can see the next breed of Battlebots planning for this escapade. They'll all install forward facing halogen lamps. No BEAM bot can resist the light.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
the main idea is that intelligence is something that *emerges* from the combination of the various behaviors. There is certainly some truth to that. But I am not altogether convinced that this is the full picture.
I recall some articles about the potential data density of the brain. For example, the brain has an extraordinary high level of magnetite (?) in the cells. This makes the nuerons sensitive the magnetic fields. Since there is a high level of electic activity in the brain, this raises all kinds of subtle questions about the influence to nuerons of magnetism.
there are a number of similar questions in the field of nuerology, but I do not have them at my finger tips
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I've been building BEAM bots for a few years now, and I was wondering when a BEAM article would get posted here. cool.
:) I have a few that I've built for under $10 US, and none have been more than $30.
For anyone interested in this, especially if you have been discouraged by trying to build other forms of robots, please look into BEAM. While it isn't always as cheap as they like to make it seem, it's much more rewarding than typical CPU-driven robotics.
If you would really like to learn more, you could try Solarbotics and get a kit, or just build your own from scraps. (It's much cheaper that way.
But don't be fooled.. even though they are reasonably easy to build, they are worthy of the title "Research Platform". The analog loops that Nv neurons produce can form some strikingly natural paterns. And people tend to like BEAM bots a little more than CPU based versions because they move much more quickly and naturally.
Above all, of course, have fun.
I no longer follow links from anyone over uid #200k, unless they are easily verifyable (sharkyextreme, nytimes, zdnet, etc). All these virtual domain hosts seem to be extra pleasure for the trolls...
They must get a kick out of it... I browse with Java/JS off, except when I need it on (espn, financial sites).
There's something that I wish I had - if Netscape let me selectively enable Java/JS for particular domains, or even if I turned it off in one window, it shouldn't affect the others I have up, and vice-versa... hmmm...
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Every object in the worldspace updated in its own independant cycle; the trick was to adjust the bird's forward angle to move towards other birds only if the distance between them was outside a set of bounds (if its too far, move closer; if its too close, turn away)
The result? Flocking behaviour. Another example of a seemingly complex natural system reduced to a small set of rules.
-- Scott
Someone posted a diary that his Aibo wrote. His Aibo is still a baby so the entries are very basic. It's still interesting.
Have you noticed that artificial intelligence is becoming more and more feared as "natural" intelligence diminishes? Hmm...
That started out as just a sarcastic comment, but now I see some sense to it. If uninformed people would take some time to learn about the problems that AI currently faces, as well as the restrictions we can put on it, as well as the benefits that it can provide us, would this irrational fear still exist? One of the best applications that I have ever heard for an AI application is a "diagnosis machine." An expert system, always ready, always alert, that you describe your symptoms to and it will tell a hysterical mother at 3 in the morning to give their child some asprin, burp them, and put them to bed, or justify their fears and tell them to get the ailing child to a hospital.
This seems to me to be just another case of fear of the unknown. It has parallels to every technology issue unfairly being given bad light in the media. Compare fear of AI to fear of hackers (used in the benevolent sense). John Q. Public does not understand their motives, their methods, or their limitations. Begin fear mongering now.
I wonder how much saner the world would be if people were required to understand things before judging them. Wow! I just independantly stumbled upon the Heinlein concept of grok... That's eerie.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Sorry BEAM lovers but it just doesn't work. Maybe I'm biased, I have a graduate degree from doing robotics research at a very well known university.
BEAM robotics are interesting from nothing more than an analog circuit perspective. I'll give you that. They are not solving any problems that real robotics professionals and researchers are trying to solve. I do not consider Mark Tilden to be a robotics researcher any more than I consider a computer technician to be an electrical engineer. Until I can see a BEAM robot that does more than scamper around... until I see a BEAM robot that can play soccer... until I see a BEAM robot that cooperate with another BEAM robot... until I see a BEAM robot walk into a volcano, drive on mars, navigate a hospital, retrieve books in a library... I don't want to hear about BEAM
Maybe I'm closed minded, I have seen alot of stuff in my days but I will not be a believer until Mark Tilden can demonstrate more useful functionality. BTW did you all hear that Tilden is moving to software control? He's retreating from the "robustness" of his analog core and realizing how limited it is without higher level control. A reactive low-level is almost universally accepted as a standard part of robot architectures but useful work often needs the upper level control.
Rod Brooks picked up on this idea, and did some good insect robot work. But then he got hubris, started doing TV interviews, the "Rod Brooks World Tour", T-shirts, and Cog.
When Brooks first gave a talk at Stanford on his plans for Cog, the general idea was to try for human-level AI by building a seated robot body and throwing about 30 MIT PhD theses at the problem. It hasn't worked. I asked Brooks "Why don't you build a robot lizard or mouse?", that being the next step up from the insect work. He said that "he didn't want to go down in history as the guy who built the world's best robot mouse".
This is a classic problem with AI researchers. They get a halfway decent idea, and they start thinking human-level AI is just around the corner. AI goes through one of these enthusiasms every five years or so, some of the main ones having been search, rules, theorem proving, neural nets, and genetic algorithms. All of these are useful, and all have hit a ceiling beyond which further work doesn't produce much improvement.
I tell people we're probably going to have to claw our way up the evolutionary ladder, and the next step is the lizard brain level of intelligence. This is happening, amusingly, in the game world, where opponent control AI has to solve the basic problems of life: not falling down, not bumping into stuff, and back-seat driving the machinery that controls those tasks into getting something done.
Me too?
But then a robot looking like bug would come travelling in time, to protect the eggs, sent by the cockroaches who survived the nuclear holocaust.
It's its. They're their, there. You're your. Who's whose? A looser loser, though those two too threw through the trough.
Had the writer of the diary actually built the machines...
h ttp://www.geocities.com/frankendaddy/BEAM.html
Instead, she intones that her boyfriend and her roommate ended up putting them together, and the roommate was the one actually soldering - what, was the boyfriend there for moral support (apparently so, she says later on one goes home after the racer did not immediately work, which could only mean the boyfriend, since the roommate is at home)?
Instead, she says she served drinks. Then, the rest of the article goes into really inane observations of the machines "at play". The only fun observation was of the photovore avoiding a grape, and getting to the lamp.
All this individual ended up doing was writing an article. I would have been more impressed had she tackled the soldering iron, made a few mistakes, learned how to solder, and build the racer. Even if it didn't work right, it at least would have shown that she tried to learn something completely new - instead of passively letting life go by.
Furthermore, she doesn't feel these devices are really worth the effort put into the building of them. You can tell by the tone of the writing. She talks about setting up an environment filled with various knick knacks and things. Why doesn't she get it about BEAM - hobble the damn thing! Put tape on one of the photovore's motors, see how it works around this "impediment"! Geez, is experimentation that difficult?!
People, if you want to know more about BEAM, and want to play with it yourself, avoid this article. Here are a few links to check instead:
http://www.solarbotics.com/ (she could've at least provided this link!)
http://www.nis.lanl.gov/projects/robot/
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
This has become a rather cliche statement on slashdot. Why should we care if you remember seeing these things before? Neither the slashdot blurb nor the article make any claims of these robots being invented last week or anything. This is just another silly and pointless proclamation of, "been there, done that." This practice is all too widespread on slashdot. I don't know what anybody is expecting to acheive by doing this. What do you expect readers to think by saying this? "Wow, this dude has seen this before, he must have a giant cock!"
You shouldn't need to summarize. We can read the article and understand this.
Why should we care what you think? Are you an AI expert? Why aren't you convinced?
This whole paragraph is utterly pointless. Yes, it does contain a few random factoids, but it doesn't go anywhere with these or have any real purpose.
Are you a nuerologist? Why do you think it is so important to point this out?
I got interested in BEAM after seeing a documentary featuring Mark Tilden and his robots. However, after looking through the plans for some BEAM robots, these things appear to be little more than glorified wind up toys.
"Nothing would be preprogrammed"? This is untrue. The programming is done through careful design of the analog circuitry.
I don't see tilden's approach as scaling to even true insect like intelligence.
You know, there's a school of thought that says this is how the brain was evolved in the first place. Ever wonder why every creature with a complex nervous system keeps the central node of that system in such a vulnerable place -- the head? One theory is that our wormlike ancestors, crawling blindly through the primeval muck, gradually evolved their frontal cells into things that could react to whatever they were crawling into. A structure for providing simple response to physical stimuli gradually evolved into a general-purpose organ for complex response -- the brain.
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(maybe even having the robot "eat" the bugs and use the carcass for energy)
:-)
On a BEAM mailing list, someone posted a link to an article about a gastro-robot that someone (or some institute) had developed - you feed it food, and a chemical (and probably micro-biological) processor used it to recharge the batteries.
I have thought about making an insect killer robot, but I kept refining the idea, and eventually, arrived at a design which, while effective, was more like a static trap, which doesn't have the exotic flavour of a roaming insect terminator, so I never bothered to attempt it