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Xerox PARC Working On Modular Robots
An reader writes "I was watching Discovery Channel Canada last night, and they had a story about modular robotics that is being researched at Xerox PARC. Rather than build a single, large robot, project leader Mark Yim is working on small, autonomous bots that can work together to achieve a desired goal. When many of this bots are linked together, they call the result a polybot. "
Please! That's not news.
DROS - Open-Source Robot Software
Isn't this similar to how Unix does things? Instead of monolithic applications (*cough* MS *cough*), we have a number of smaller apps that can be linked to do something else (i.e. awk, sed, grep, find etc).
I believe experiments that have been conducted allowing robots to be generated in an artificial environment and then automatically assembled favored those that formed symbiotic relationships.
And besides, the idea will just be stolen from PARC. It's a shame.
Now this is the kind of creative thinking that will really revolutionize robotics. Intelligent pieces that can assemble themselves into colonies that are greater than the sum of their parts. I would especially like to see this approach used in nanotech (but only if Asimov's Laws of Robotics are indelibly burned into the molecules).
doesn't anybody remember the constructicon devastator... the first polybot
Sounds a lot like those transformer toys where you assemble many small robots to get one big robot. It would be funny to have those small bots assemble to make car or trucks, or aircrafts.
Will Bandai or another of the compagnies that built those toys sue those guys? I suppose someone has already patented the idea of Robot changing into transportation mean.
The polypod looks more like a rainworm to me. Ah yeah, seperate pieces can self-assemble into a larger worm.
Now add a replication device, so the worm can actually grow itself...
(Oh no, it's taken over southern California!)
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
This project has been going on for some time now, it's been well publicized in the robotics community and is certainly an interesting offshoot of robotics. I saw a presentation at ICRA (International Conference for Robotics and Automation) last year. Very cool.
It strikes me as rather similar in approach to some of the nano-bot discussions I've read. I.e. build an "assembler" and use that to build other small pieces that can fit together modularly to do what you want. (that's kind of rough, but you get the idea) Interesting parallel in totally different research worlds, although modularity is hardly novel..
The approach does have it's challenges however, the number of independent modules arguably makes the complexity much higher per resultant functionality. A simpler robot could have achieved some of those configurations, and probably more efficiently (power,weight,computational, etc..). Similarly, most robots are rather specifically designed with some task in mind, making general purpose robots is an astoundingly difficult task because of the widely varying requirements of the physical world between different tasks.
I don't mean to bash, actually - I fully support this avenue of research and it's darn cool! Wish I had one..
Brett
UCSD Computer Vision and Robotics Lab Grad Student
Here's the CVRR web page if you're link-happy (no goats).
__ No registration required to read this message. They did it in the Matrix.
This research project is repackaged swarm robotics. Swarm robots have been around for years. The main problem with swarms is getting the power and leverage to manipulate large objects as the swarm is only as strong as it's weakest link. The main benefit is that they tend to be more fault tolerant than monolithic robots.
See:
Robotics portal
Swarm robotics google search
CMU Robotics Institute
Plus, based on their recent comments on IP, they seem like a pretty cool company.
shut up man
Ohshit. They've invented the replicators. We Doomed!
In one of Asimov's books about robots. Admittedly this was a client/server type robot, rather than a peer to peer one.
However, unless someone can prove otherwise, it looks like the original idea was Asimov's.
http://www.scifiguide.net/stargate/s4/401.html
Stargate SG-1 Episode "Small Victories" where they meet the Replicators, an evil group of robots that destroy entire worlds and civilizations, eating the raw materials to replicate, while absorbing the technology and using the shells of the conquered ships to find more civilizations and more advanced technology to absorb. Kind of like the Borg, but even more sinister in that they cannot be corrupted or reasoned with.
You can watch a DivX of the episode at SG1Archive http://www.sg1archive.com between season three final episode and season four 1st episode.
Remember that Bill Joy article speculating that humanity would be destoryed by a grey-slime of nanobots? Well, this is the type of work that's going to make them - imagine zillions of these things at nano-scale, each with it's own 'soft' (i.e using natural principals rather than heuristics) artificial intelligence all working together to provide a giant hive mind.
Asimov's laws of robotics seem ridiculous in this context.
It's VOLTRON! Defender of the universe!
WHAT!? VOLTRON came WAAAAAAY before the Constructicons!
Legobots.
There's a bit of a trademark issue, but still..
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Robot football could be a good inspirational line of thinking for research in polybots. We have several competitions going into robot football. These games will probably contribute to the system design of polybots. The idea here is to have many (more or less) identical robots, who by working together can reach some sort of goal.
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One of the things that have come from robot football events is that the individual robots need some sort of collaborative software to coordinate their efforts. So a polybot would proably benefit from a singe strong computer brain, distributing commands to the individual robots. Other approaches (manly in the nanobot research) move towards a simple set of rules that combined provides the desired effect.
Robot football can easily be found through the search engines, but here are some links:
Competition:
http://www.tech.plym.ac.uk/robofoot/
http://www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/projects/robotfoot
Some research:
http://www.cci.cse.dmu.ac.uk/cci/Projects/footb
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
How long before one of these guys gets entered for Robot Wars/Battle Bots? I believe those shows use evolutionary principles...
------------ jay*arr*tee
I thought the result was called a Japanese car factory
This is a pretty old idea stolen from some japanese tv series where several autonomous (and human controlled) robots are combined to create a bigger and more powerful robot in order to destroy several types of monsters that are able to grow from human-sized to wtc-sized ones.
Gekiganger III!
These guys have been around for years, as have similar groups, one of which I spent the last three years working with. USC had a really sweet robot for size and power, but Xerox was up to 15 amps per face last I recall. That is NEVER going to be autonomous, at least not for more than a millisecond or two. For more modular, self-reconfigurable robots, check out I-Cubes (my former job). There are lots of pretty pictures and links to a bunch of other groups, like CONRO at USC and Fractum from Japan.
That sounds like the begining of StarGate's "replicants".... ooooooh! scary.
I had to say it.
They bettter not let Apple in their labs.
One of the main focal points of Society of Mind, by Marvin Minsky was that the human mind was composed of thousands of functions like sleep, anger, hunger, etc. Reading that the robots are built out of moduals, does that mean they might be intelligent in some way ?
"The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next" - Helen Keller
The pioneer when it comes to small, unintelligent, autonomous bots without a microprocessor must be Mark Tilden.
His creations are so cool, with the Spyder as the crown jewel. He has also applied for a few patents when it comes to his neuro-net technology, with components called BiCore and MultiCore, among others.
See www.solarbotics.com for information, pictures and more!
:wq!
it's called a polygone
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Optimus Prime, get Polybot on our side and we can purge the world of that nasty Megatron forever!
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Has Apple and m$ ripped them off yet? :-)
Last I heard, the big X was looking to sell off Pala Alto Research to avoid going bankrupt (this was right about when I quit working for Xerox), I've not heard anything about their financial status since...Does anyone know if PARC is still in danger of being sold?
VOLTRON!
I picked some of those up for my kids a couple of years ago, I think they called them Transformers or something.
I don't believe this stuff will be stolen from PARC nor that other technologies were necessarily stolen. PARC has a history of developing huge numbers of innovations and selecting those that will actually support the strategic direction of Xerox for production. The rest are sort of gifts to the rest of us.
This technology however shows that Xerox continually innovates through PARC. The thoughts racing through my mind regarding the use for reconfigurable and self-repairing robots that can act in conjunction with others are astounding! Talk about adaptability....
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
Voltron!
-motardo
Related link. Modular robots that change configuration on the fly to adapt to their environment. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~rus/self-reconfig.htm l
We've seen this done before... it was originally a collection of robot lions that link together to form Voltron, Defender of the Universe!!!
Rodney Brooks published a similar idea: Fast Cheap, and Out of control in 1989. (This is different than the movie.)
I particularly like a related, albeit less useful, plan of sending two robots to the moon, each covered in logos of various large companies. The plan was to finance the trip by selling the pictures the robots would take of each other.
I found these guys searching for modular robots a few months ago. The ideas behind their stuff are very similar if on a larger scale. The videos seem fake though. Anyone know anything more about them or have any insight into thier validity?
Conan Obrien has successfully developed and tested a robot technically refered to as Pimpbot.
I can just imagine a swarm of Pimpbots.
Has anyone looked at the dates on the bottoms of the pages? Feb 29 2000, Apr 19 2000, etc. Shows a little something about how quickly this type of thing hits the "normal" media. I'd also like to see an update on this. Where is it today? Where is G3 that was expected to be completed by the end of 2000? Has it been implemented or is it now dead? What would be real news is an implementation, not theory. Modular robots have been covered on Slashdot before. I want to see reality, not theory.
My name fits again.
it's VOLTRON!
It would be wonderful if we had some polybots to aid with the search and rescue effort going on at the wtc RIGHT NOW. It seems like we should be able to design small, tenacious bots that could go into the hostile, challenging terrain of the wreckage and find people below the surface. Each bot could sport one or more cameras and be driven remotely by rescue teams on the surface. Perhaps they could use gps and/or each other's relative location to pinpoint the location of folks they find in three dimensions.
Thanks for the kind words ! As you say, we have many challanges (I'm one of the researchers on the project - though speaking unofficially etc, etc).
Purpose built robots (99% of robots out there) are cheaper and do the job they are designed for better...but you need a different robot for each specialised task. If you can buy just one robot and have it do *everything*, then that's a different story.
Forum about a month ago on this topic.
They gave some high school kids a bunch of these modules, and some lectures, and access to PARC people to bother with questions. The students came up with some pretty incredible stuff.
I don't have any urls for their work, but here is the PARC Forum announcement:
WIGGLEBOT, STRIKER, ARTBOT, ROAMER, AND NOX:
TEENAGE ADVENTURES IN MODULAR ROBOTICS
Apprentices from the Institute for Educational Advancement
Xerox PARC Forum
Thursday, August 09, 2001
4:00-5:00PM
George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC
Abstract:
This summer PARC participated in a project involving 10 exceptional high
school students from around the country, a few computers, a few PARC
scientists, and some advanced robotic modules. The program, one of several
sponsored by the Institute for Educational Advancement
(www.educationaladvancement.org), is based on an apprenticeship model for
learning, with mentors and hosts drawn from corporations, universities, fine
arts workshops, and other institutions.
In our two-week-long program, the students learned enough Java programming,
machining, and mechanical engineering skills to design and build 5 different
autonomous robots each made of up to 10 individually controlled "polybot"
modules. On the way, we lectured them, put them into discussion groups with
school administrators, took field trips to local robotics research labs, and
had them present their work alongside Ph.D candidate research projects.
There were many late night work sessions, and the robot designs that emerged
were surprising and exceptionally creative. It was all great fun for both
the students and the mentors.
At the forum, some of the students will return to present the results of
their work and their thoughts. We will also present, after brief (4 days)
reflection, some thoughts on the program and some thoughts on the
structuring of educational experiences of this kind.
Speakers:
Apprentices and Mentors from the Institute for Educational Advancement
(www.educationaladvancement.org)
Xerox will just develop it to the point were it works, then abondon it for someone else to use and make money off of.
The mouse...Graphical User Interface...any of these ring a bell?
When I was a kid we called these things Constructicons and when the merged together they were then called Devistator.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.