Slashdot Mirror
Modular Robots
levin writes "An article in the latest issue of IEEE spectrum discusses modular robots--robots made of small, identical components or modules. These robots can slither, roll like a tank tread, inchworm, or crawl like a spider. The idea is that modular robots will be not only cheaper to build because the modules are all the same, but will be more able to repair themselves (by shedding damaged modules). Even cooler, each of the 5cm cube modules in Xerox PARC's polybot sports its own PowerPC 555 and 1mb ram."
Hmm.. the more that each module has to do, the more "expensive" that module becomes. Would these be more expensive, both in energy and $$, than just having specialized robots?
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
I can't wait until these things get mass-produced and more intelligent.
Soon we'll have to hunt robot mosquitos and spiders with the fly swatter -- or possibly with a hammer if these damn things keep repairing themselves.
an interest in robots or something? This is like the 50th story today on robots. Ok, second, but still.
Quick breakdwn of robot topics lately:
microscopic robots
tiny robots that can move in different ways
robots designed to kill other robots
as well as the 3 or 4 AI articles, and a few others I didn't bother to read.
Maybe....
News for Scientists, Stuff for Robots?
ok, this comment was posted in jest, so don't get your robots in a wad.
Sent from your iPad.
I think your question is a little vague. "... that have fairly advanced AI?" What does that mean? AI to do what? In my 3rd year of school we had to build robots that searched a maze, blew out a candle, and came home. It was a pretty smart robot. You could put ramps in the hallways, change the room after he finds the candle, or put 3 candles in a room.
What application are you looking for in regards to AI? Its highly doubtful AI will ever get to a point where you just install an EEPROM, turn it on, and the "thing" figures out why it is there.
The 'imagine a beowulf cluster' comments are more applicable here than in most of the articles I read... Imagine billions of robots able to work in tandem, infinitely reconfigurable. An office building/space craft? An automobile/boat. Hello Transformers...
Guvegrra?
>>Modular reconfigurable robots are built up from tens to hundreds, and potentially millions, of modules.
Millions of modules? Like molecules? Can you say "liquid metal alloy?"
Damn, I hope the company doesn't start calling itself "Cyberdyne".....
load "windows7"
I don't think making these things is such a good idea. TV has taught us that they will eventually take over a Russian submarine and almost destroy Thor's home world.
What, you didn't see "Small Victories" from the fourth season of Stargate SG1?
By advances, I was talking in general. Is there any type of systems developed for consumers that can make decisions based on outside input and make physical reactions based upon a large set of rules or guidelines. The generalized question was to ask if there were any robots or mechanized devices that can be purchased at affordable prices(
Beyond your average "Programmed to go towards light, then programmed to bark" kind of robot you described.
The rules for BattleBots specificly mention "polybots" (aka a modular robot). However, I can only remember seeing one robot a few seasons ago that used such a design, and it didn't do too well.
The rules for polybots go like this:
I believe there is also a rule that only two people on your team are allowed to be by the arena for driving, which will limit the number of peices that can be manualy controled. (I'm not sure about that rule, though).
There are also practical considerations to when taking the third rule into account. Imagine bringing in your highly-modular robot and telling the judges that your bot has a total of 2^32 possible configurations, and it must be weighed in all of them. The best thing to do in this circumstance is to call up the judges before the tourny and ask them if the bot can just be weighed in the configuration you're about to send into the arena. Bots are reweighed before each fight anyways, so this shouldn't be a problem.
Anybody have ideas for a good polybot?
Not a typewriter
This opens up quite a number of doors in the robotics industry; as each new module can [potentially] add processing power to the chain -- making the robot even more capable. Furthermore, as long as the interfaces between modules are kept consistant, it would be possible to engineer special modules for specialized tasks, which only adds to the versatility of the robot.
It's kind of like having industrial-grade legos.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
but I guess I missed it. What would these things be used for? I mean, in the article it said they would be able to traverse difficult terrain, etc., but we already have robots that can do that.
This is a serious question, What the hell would they be used for? Did someone see that in the article or somewhere else?
Sent from your iPad.
Consider first that the CPU in these machines is of the same family as a Power Macintosh. Then consider the jointed arm that the latest iMac employs to support the screen. I can see a future model of Mac that not only smiles at you when you boot it up, but tries to hug you as well.
Ok, so I'm probably going to be pointing a giant neon sign at my head that reads "NERD!" but, back when I was into table top RPG's, Battletech in particular, There was a segment of the Battletech universe called "The Clans" which had mechs that had modular weapons. Meaning, all you had to do was supposidly slide in and out the weapons for configuration. Now in actual game play, this didn't really show up (Gameplay being much more cooler when Mech's have an individual shape - Mad Cat as opposed to a Thor for those of you that played the video games) but it is just a little bit of background factoid which runs similar with the story
blah
Hrmmm, interesting. They can program a module that's self aware, knows when a module connected to it is damaged and is capable of repairing that module. Plus fulfilling it's mission requirements, and all in 1mb of RAM.....
So why does my PC need 128mb just to type a Word document without crashing?
...I've been doing this with LEGO Mindstorms for a couple of years now.
Yep, imagine module Vaporizer Weapon being detached from competitor A. Then B picks it up and installs it on an open slot. If modular robots could enter BattleBot and do this, imagine the beasts that would compete over the finals. Assembled parts from the fallen enemies, that's very cool..
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
... the Christmas tree robot in Robert Forward's "The Flight of the Dragonfly". Dr. Hans Moravec designed it for Dr. Forward, and it has since been used in several other novels by other authors.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Are we going to get Constructicons? I want Devastator to do my bidding!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
In fact, the cost savings from the launch might well pay for the extra cost of the robot. Especially once modular robots are the de facto NASA standard and are cranked out in quantity by the lowest bidder. : )
Mr. Ska
Holy shit...is there a video game like this? For console or PC, I'd pick it up in a second. :^)
Imagine a robot being able to break a portion of itself off and send it to perform a sub task. Imagine two robot getting together to cooperate on a task by combining and spliting apart again once the task was completed.
The Economics of Website Security
For more information on modular robots, and the 1993 research done at Stanford University on polypod, the bot that preceeded Xerox PARC's polybot, visit The Edge Report, which has posted a brief follow-up to the Slashdot article.
Direct link to the story is:
http://www.edgereport.com/article.php?sid=138
--
They talk about systems of up to 1 million of these modules. 1 million processors is gonna suck up a hell of a lot of power not to mention the motors etc. Its gonna generate a lot of heat too, where is the power for these things supposed to come from if they are supposed to be used for plant exploration and stuff?
They finally brought the Soda Constructor to life!
(FYI - This is a the "replicator" from Stargate: SG-1)
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Actually, there is a more appropriate toy. I couldn't remember the name, but after a lot of searching on the web, I found it's name. It was called Capsella, and it was around in either the late 1970s or the 1980s (or both). You bought a bunch of interconnecting parts (most looked like clear spheres with pipes coming out of them that had gears and stuff inside). You would then connect them to motorize your creation. This was before Lego Mind Storm, but Lego Mind Sotrm is far more complicated. The basic idea is the same as what they are trying to do with these robots. I always wanted one as a kid.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Sexbots would be expensive; if you get bored with one, your only alternative would be to go buy a new one, which would be costly. But with modular sexbots, you can save money and just go buy a new head module, personality module, arms, legs, and other sundry body parts. I'd be much cheaper than having to buy an entirely new sexbot.
I'd invest in the company that produces these...
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
But imagine what you could do with a 5 cm^3 computer if it were a self-powered cube that could automatically share number-crunching resources with any other cube it got connected with.
Specifically, I address in this off-topic post the feasability of simulating the human brain with current technology.
Before we start, see here for the statistics I am using.
Note especially that:
I'll now interpret this information.
Let's posit for a second (wrongly) that a five hundred megahertz computer ("PowerPC 555" in article, though again the article refers to robots, not mere number-crunching computers) could simulate with each hertz all that a neuron does in one firing. (By contrast, a typical "hertz" in today's gigahertz computers is less than required to retrieve two thirty-two bit numbers, add them, and store the result.)
With this assumption, we'd only need (upper estimate) 200,000 such processors [1] to simulate the brain real-time.
200,000 * 5 cubic centimeters (size of these suckers) is 1,000,000 cubic centimeters, or 100 centimeters to each side of a cube, which is 1 cubic meter.
That's not very big at all, and even if these robots cost $2,000 each, 200,000 of them would only cost $400 million.
The problem, of course, is that no way one hertz on these babies is going to simulate all that a neuron does, even on average, since each neuron is connected to up to 5,000 other neurons, and has a small interaction with each one each time it fires.
Since a 32-bit integer can enumerate ("address") just over 4 billion items, we would need an integer and another byte (we'd only use half) to address each of the other 50 billion neurons. In other words, just to pass information about which current connection we're looking at we need to handle two 4-byte integers and another byte on each end of your dendrite (connector and connectee). If we assume that an "interaction" between two neurons, when one of them fires, takes a hundred real hertz to process (I think this is fair, since the amount of logical information that a neuron stores can be represented by two or three variables, which you'd read, compare, see if a threshold is met, then store), then we'd need not one hertz per neuron but 100 hertz * 5000 dendrites (connections to other neurons with which it transacts). Our 1 cubic meter has just jumped to 500,000 (five cubic kilometers), and our $400 million price-tag has just jumped to $20 trillion.
But $20 trillion will buy you the processing power (not necessarily the io bandwidth) to process as much as the human brain can possibly, ever process, if every neuron is connected to as many other neurons as it possibly can, and each one is firing as much as it biologically can, by the highest estimate anyone estimates, and is connected to as many other neurons as anyone estimates is possible.
Needless to say, your actual costs for doing as much processing as the human brain processes are much, much lower.
Why, if you take simply the fact that the max hertz we calculated as 2000, whereas the "max" is 250-2,000, and the "average" by most estimates is around 20 hertz (a neuron, on average, will not fire more than twenty times a second), you've just reduced your processing time by a factor of 100, going from $20 trillion back down to $200 billion.
Now let's look at the difference between the "processing" that we said we can buy for $2000 (500 megahertz) and the io bandwidth we need.
We estimated 100 hertz per neuron interaction with another neuron, and we said that a neuron was connected with 5000 other neurons, and that the "state" of each connection could be represented (logically) by three 32-bit integers (four bytes each) and another 5 bytes just to address the second neuron, we now need 8 bytes * 5,000 neurons available over the timespan of 100 hertz, where we're looking at a 500 megahertz computer. This means that to get the io bandwidth over one second, we multiply these eight bytes by 5,000,000 (the quotient of 500 megahertz and 100 hertz), and get 40 million / 1024*1024 = 38.14 megabytes/second.
If we forget about the 5-cm cubes (and any semblance of topicality) this actually isn't so unreasonable, since a $2000 computer needing only 500 megahertz shouldn't have any problem with 38.13 megs/second. Or 4 gigs of RAM.
Anyway, let me know where my numbers are off, but it seems I've concluded that, today, $200 billion will buy you everything you need to simulate a human brain real-time, without any compression or special optimization.
So then next time somebody says: "Computer will never think, because only human can think." You can proudly answer:
"Shut your face, ignorant person. Soon as we figure out all the laws of neural interaction and find a way to image someone's brain, $1.57 billion dollars will buy you all the computer processing you need to simulate that brain real-time. [10.5 years from now, or 7 Moore's law iterations -- I divided $200 billion by two to the seventh]. But, of course, if ten and a half years to you is longer than "never", then feel free to remain ignorant, moron."
ac.
of course, I've been known to be wrong. please correct me gently.
[1] this is 50 billion divided by 250,000, since 500 megahertz is 250,000 more frequent than 2,000 hertz.
What's this then?
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Here's a guy with even grander ideas along these lines. Crackpot or genius? Take a look and decide for yourself....
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
the super-duper EXOCOMP! yippee!!!
Exocomp, I command you to fashion a special kind of suction device for me this evening...
Safe sex in the 24th century!
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
They cost ~£150 (or atlest thats how much I paied when they first came out)
They are pritty cool, and by default you can make some niffty stuff (like RADAR's). See the website, or the back of the box for actual content.
You need a serial port (Mac users think USB to serial port atapter).
To develop "applications" for them, either use
The Stuff That They Come With (crappy, aimmed for kids)
VB, or other OCX-enabled Windows Delopement System
Not Quite C, aviable on most plateforms, including UNIX (and alikes (Linux)), Win32, BeOS and MacOS. As the auther of the BeOS port, I can say it's piss easy to port if you need to.
LegOS, A miniOS for the RCX, looks pritty darn cool.
leJOS, Java RCX and tinyVM for Java based interfaces.
mlk
Wow, I should not post when knackered.