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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. "
Plus, based on their recent comments on IP, they seem like a pretty cool company.
shut up man
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.