A Robot Learns To Fly

jerkychew writes: "For those of you that read my last post about the robot escaping its captors, there's more news regarding robots and AI. According to this Reuters article, scientists in Sweden created a robot that essentially 'learned to fly' in just three hours. The robot had no preprogrammed instructions on how to achieve lift, it had to deduce everything through trial and error. Very interesting stuff."

Comments

Genetic Algorithms? Anybody?

[CompVisGuy]

There are lots of posts from people who don't really get what these guys did. I don't think they made a particularly amazing achievement, but many slashdotters out there don't seem to understand the science behind the achievement (the Reuters article was awful, second hand from New Scientist, which is often poor on presenting the basics).

What the researchers did was to build a robot that had wings and motors for manipulating them. These could be controlled by a computer. But instead of writing an explicit program telling the robot how to fly, they got the robot to learn how to fly. They did this using some sort of Genetic Algorithm.

Basically, what a GA does is to generate a large population of possible solutions to the problem, then evaluate how good each one is (i.e. measure the lift each one creates in this example) and then to breed good solutions to create successive generations of possible solutions which are (hopefully) better than the previous generations.

Then, once some criterion is met (for example, once the average fitness of your population doesn't change much for several generations), you then select the best solution found so far as being your answer.

In mathematical terms, GAs are stochastic methods of optimising a function; they are typically used when solving the problem using an analytic method would be problematic (i.e. it would take too long etc.).

So it's not really surprising the robot learned to 'fly' -- the researchers just managed to find an optimal sequence of instructions to send to the wings.

The next step would be to get a robot to learn how to hover without the aid of the stabilising poles; then fly from one location to the other; then fly in a straight line in the presence of varying wind etc.

What the research does do is to lend credence to the argument that insects and birds could have evolved, rather than having been 'designed' by some sort of a God.