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Immobile Robots
Roland Piquepaille writes "Wade Roush wrote a long and well-documented article for the Technology Review about this new concept, the immobot, short for "immobile robot." He gives different industrial examples, from NASA to the water utility in Porto Alegre, and from Toyota cars to some new Xerox photocopiers. And he looks at the programming model behind the immobots. No "heuristic" programs here, but model-based programs instead. Check this column for details." The original article has more information.
Wouldn't an immobile robot just be a computer, then? It seems as though they are just discussing AI, eh.
It's called my computer. While it isn't very useful for getting me things, I'm not afraid I'll wake up one night to find it holding a knife at my throat.
But Deep Space One had something Mars Polar Lander lacked: an onboard robot ... [which] devised a successful plan
Nonsense, of course, it was just programmed better.
Immobile robot == computer. Whoopdedoo.
What was Gutenberg's press? A presentient nonmobile robot?
C'mon people...
about 8 or so years ago i had a photocopier which was able to diagnose its own problems.
isn't this the same thing?
Imobile robots ... sounds alot like some of the computer obsessed people i know. Doesn't thinkgeek have a fridge for your desk now? I mean, we don't even have to get up to get beer anymore...
...like this is just another stab at A.I.? It's hardly a robot of any type according to most standards, but rather a program that has some limited self-awareness?
Even so, the examples don't really seem to indicate self-awareness, as much as a somewhat more robust error diagnosis. BFD. Nice if you can get it, but it's nothing new.
Personally, when I read the headline, I thought of 'robots that don't walk around', which to me describes most real robotics systems...so maybe I was jaded before I read the article.
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
I think most of the posters so far are missing the big point. Even having a computer control a function at a water plant still requires a fairly large degree of human supervision. Someone has to make sure the computer is working properly, make sure the control programs don't screw up, and if the programs do screw up, they must fix them. The idea behind immobots seems to take it a bit further than that by actually reducing the amount of control neccessary. I suppose you could say it's just a computer, but then couldn't all things effectivly be reduced to computers (our brains, for exmaple) which certain things in common and certain things different.
The point of this article was that the immobots require almost no human control, whereas a computer still requires a human. Or something like that. Just my 1/2000000000000th of Bill's (estimated) fortune worth.
Posting as directed.
- Silradio - A radio with no sound.
- Cleartv - A TV with no picture.
- CPUlessPC - A computer without a CPU.
- Darklight - duh.
Since this article is pointless... here's something else to do:Sex - Find It
Using its engineering knowledge, the robot tried to repair the switch by toggling it on and off.
Isn't this like saying "Using my engineering knowledge, I tried to repair the toilet by jiggling the handle." I'd hardly call brute-force "engineering knowledge."
As you can probably see, a lot of these things don't even need IC's to do their job. This article, IMHO, is like saying the wheel was a great invention.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
IMMOBILE.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
"water utility in Porto Alegre"
When I visited Porto Alegre (in southernmost Brasil, near Uruguay) eleven years ago, they were already then monitoring deformities in various fish species as to detect any increase/decrease. The prejudiced me didn't expect that then.
Definition of Robot: noun: 1. A mechanical device that sometimes resembles a human being and is capable of performing a variety of often complex human tasks on command or by being programmed in advance. 2. A machine or device that operates automatically or by remote control. 3. A person who works mechanically without original thought, especially one who responds automatically to the commands of others. ETYMOLOGY: Czech., from robota, drudgery. Compulsory labors. * The foundation of the term robot as it is used today can be found in a science fiction book and a play written by Karel Capek. The book is titled Valka s Mloky (War with the Newts) and the play is titled R.U.R (Rozuma Univerzalni Roboti) [rozum means wisdom] (Rozum's Universal Robots).
:)
Technically anything that is compulsory labour is a robot, as long as it is artifical. So is a clone a robot? Anyhow, photocopies come under definition 2. Just though i'd drop the definition in
--+> Life, is there any?
( or fridge heat or car engine heat)is nothing more than an immobile robot. Some of them even have electrical logic circuits these days, but even the "old fashioned" kind were a simple analog robot with its "logic" built into the properties of the materials.
Pretty much nothing to see here I'm afraid. Your house has been full of variants of the simple "immobile robot" for several decades.
KFG
The idea behind immobots seems to take it a bit further than that by actually reducing the amount of control neccessary.
Whereas mobile robots (Mobots) require more human interaction. Exactly how does a computer not provide a service which any businessman with half a brain or more wouldn't have an administrator/engineer oversee?
Unlock the pod bay doors, HAL. HAL? Unlock the pod bay doors.
It might have your balls in a vice.
Ever fallen asleep typing a paper in MS Word and awaken to find a blue screen of death or similar? I'm sure some college kids can relate.
If we lock a technician in a small box, we've created an immobot clone?
which listed 10 stupid design issues that flummox Linux users
Like, why have fsck stop and ask to fix the filesystem? Just go ahead and repair the dammed thing.
Or, why can't Xconfigurator make some intelligent guesses?
Immobile Robot: (politically correct term) used to describe a robot which has suffered a Blue Screen of Death.
Similar, but more polite form of: "Who borked the bot?", "The bot's FUBARed", or This bot is hosed!"
One possible cause for an immobile robot is a users irresponsible experimentation with magic.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Follow the link. The kid with his balls in a vice is the one on the lower left at the top of the page.
I'd imagine Al Gore has been around for at least 50 years now.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
"I was writing a paper on the PC ... and it was like blee-bleep blee-blee-blee-bleep, and then ... like ... half of my paper was gone ..... and I was like ....... hunh? ... it devoured my paper ... it was really good paper, and then I had to write it again ... and I had to do it fast so it wasn't as good .. it's kind of ..... a bummer. I'm Ellen Feiss and I'm a student"
PC LOAD LETTER ??
um... I believe you have my stapler
analog computers, using amplifiers and control loops to simulate systems, do not use CPUs.
An Abacus does not have a CPU.
We play counterstrike instead of bothering with trivialities like immobile robots. In that respect I would like to bring up the subject of Counterstrike bots. They might be considered immobile while still being sentient to somewhat of a degree. Don't reply to this post if you disagree. Only trolls do that.
MySQL greskull YOU!
Your weak argument is laced with a drug called the Ad Hominem fallacy.
You go back to school.
Posting as directed.
Another name for high level employees at a certain Washington State corporation...
I got acused a couple weeks ago of being an immoble robot....but i think thats just becuase I never leave my computer didn't read the article but I doubt they're talking about others like me
But Deep Space One had something Mars Polar Lander lacked: an onboard robot. Lions and Tigers and Immbots, OH MY!
When I get my Mbot (with the life-like hair and kung-fu grip), it better not be yellow-green with yellow eyes and I want her shaped, to look, and feel just like Brooke Burke.
"It is essential that justice be done
Porto? What a stupid ignorant fucking WASP.
Off-topic? Stupid fucking seriously retarded mods make me laugh. Duhrrr!!
Heheheh they take a break from drooling and smacking their chest with their hands, just to mod!
Lol. 'Tards.
I just got done posting about how the moderators are 'tards. Now you have to come in here and prove that there are poster 'tards too? Ok. Here goes. You are a stupid fucking loser bastard if you think this is the best place to post a question like that.
You are one stupid mother fucker.
Helpful?
It's an interesting idea. Of course, I read the original article, not the redigested summary the poster referenced. Much better.
Reasoning from an engineering model seems to have the potential to do lots of interesting stuff. The limit the article didn't mention is the reasoning power of the robot; it seems like it could easily get overwhelmed by models that are just too big.
An interesting potential application: universal controls for complicated home entertainment systems built out of heterogenous parts.
John Roth
Yeah, but what if your thermostat knew that the reason the temperature was a tad low was because your front door was open while you were lugging in a case or two of beer, and that the temperature would equalize soon enough after you closed it, and no need to waste fuel firing up the furnace just now. Another oversimplification, sure, but the real thrust behind the article is that most of the functionality we're familiar with is based on a simple "if a then do b" logic, but hasn't involved more complicated heuristics to take into account more complicated, situational issues that fall outside of the initial assumptions on how the system should react to input.
Kineska: Cinema, soapbox, music & musings
I guess that it is very hard to think of all the errors and influences in a complex system.
While heavily interdependent systems like desktop computers might have the processing power to monitor themselves, few programmers care to write decent error-reporting features. As for me, few of the error messages I've seen actually told me about the real problem.
If it's programmed thoroughly, it's a very good idea for cars.
where's all that Karma?
I'll stick with my trusty R2D2 droid to sort out my car problems. Seriously tho, how many sensors does a computer have? Its not just a computer its a computer++.
I've got modpoints. I'm abusing them as we speak.
Ok, it seems they have a new idea that allows to design systems that react better in unexpected situations.
By the way, this would be great for PCs, at BIOS and OS levels...
But, is there any public information about how these so-called "immobots" are actually programmed ?
If it doesn't move or cause movement it is not a robot. That is the technical definition of a robot.
:
According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) a robot is a machine which can be programmed to perform tasks which involve manipulative and in some cases locomotive actions under automatic control.
The Swedish Industrial Robotics Association defines a robot as an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multi-purpose manipulative machine with or without locomotion for use in industrial automation applications.
A robot has three essential characteristics according to the Australian Robotics and Automation Association
It possesses some form of mobility
It can be programmed to accomplish a large variety of tasks
After being programmed or commanded, it operates automatically
Immobot seems to be a short hand for a control loop computer. It is a good one at least in the sense that it generated PR. After all, when was the last time you saw a slashdot article on control loop software systems?
Here.
It doesn't know that. In fact it can't know that. It can only *assume* that. That's the failure of all mechanical heuristic approaches. The human mind is more complex and dasterdly than that.
In fact Brasil deals directly with this very example.
The smartest robot is stupider than my cat, and I wouldn't trust heuristic decisions to my cat, at least with regards to my own safety and comfort.
Clippy was a bad idea. Putting clippy in control of my house when I'm perfectly capable of spending the 2 seconds to make a decision and actually *do* something myself is a revolting concept.
Maybe I've left the door open because the damned thermostat is acting funny and I need to the cool the house down through alternate means.
In the real world as it is right now this problem is dealt with by the age old method simpler, and more effectively, by the proper placement of the thermostat in the most temperature stable portion of the house *away* from the front door. Never use a computer to do what ordinary common sense arangement of physical parameters renders unecessary.
Nor can any artificial hueristic sense what *I want* at any given time. Like leaving the door open for the breeze. Humans are wonderfully changable in mood and 50 degrees may be comfortable for me one minute and intollerable the next, completely unpredictably. So even a "perfect" robot is only going to be able to operate effectively a certain small percentage of the time.
More often than not the most effective way to deal with an issue is to get off your ass for 10 whole seconds and deal directly with the issue, personally.
"Immobile robots" deal with certain things very effectively, like timing the spark to your car's engine, but very poorly when trying to figure out WHY the door is open and just what it should do about it.
There isn't even savings in human time and aggravation if you simply replace having to do it yourself with having to hit the override button and do it yourself anyway half the time.
Just like that damned paperclip.
KFG
do you mean a primmobot?
Still, we're talking about a basically good idea that needs to be pried out of the hands of the control theorists and used more. As a discipline, control theory has a theorist problem - too many of the people in the field develop pretty theory unusable in the real world. (A friend of mine on the Harvard faculty says that control theorists are failed mathematicians.) As a rule of thumb, if you pick up a book on control theory and it starts out by proving theorems, it's useless. If it starts out with "and here's how we did it in the F-15", things are looking good. Linear control theory leads to beautiful mathematics in the frequency and phase domains, based on Laplace and Z-transforms. Unfortunately, that approach doesn't get you very far for nonlinear systems or systems with multiple states. It's useful mostly for systems that maintain some steady state, for which simple PID controllers tend to be good enough.
Conceptually, model-based control is simple and elegant. You have some mathematical model of the system, which includes some number of inputs, some of which you can set (the control variables), and some of which you can only observe (the disturbance variables). You also have some number of outputs which you wish to control. The idea is to use the model in reverse to figure out useful values for the control variables, given the desired outputs and the disturbance inputs.
For models made up of certain standard components (linear elements like integrators, summers, multipliers, and certain filters) there's an analytical method for solving the model for its inputs. All the heavy work is done offline; the control system itself only has the canned solution to the problem, and a small microcontroller can do the job.
For more complex models, the analytical solution breaks down. Now, the entire solution has to be computed in real time, and the complexity of the controller software becomes much greater. It requires at least a nonlinear equation solver, and if the system has discrite states, some means of exploring the state space as well. These are non-trivial pieces of software.
This isn't a happy thing if you're running something important. The stability behavior of controllers created by offline analysis is predictable. Getting well-behaved controllers for systems that can't be analyzed analytically is tougher.
One thing you have going for you is that you can run the model whenever you want, and use it to check the proposed control solution. Model-based control lets you can ask "what if" of before you do it. You can have a dumb system that does sanity checks on the complex system. As long as you have an backup control strategy (often an emergency shutdown) for when the complex solver isn't generating good answers, there's hope of building safe systems this way.
Model based control can be made "adaptive". You build a model with some tuning parameters, and let it watch the "plant" (the system being controlled) for a while, with some other (either simpler, manual, or an older model) controller running things. The tuner then tries to tweak the model to make it match the plant. Only when the model is tracking the plant reliably is it given control. AI people call this "training"; control engineers, less inclined towards anthromorphism, call it "self-tuning".
Any time the model in control isn't tracking the plant's outputs, that's an indication that something has gone wrong. So you have a clear indication of when things are broken. Model based control is thus able to detect fairly early when it isn't working, unlike most simpler control systems.
So that's model-based control. It works for some problems. Black boxes in avionics bays of high-performance aircraft use it in flight every day. It's about to filter down to the masses, probably accompanied by the sort of hype that came with "fuzzy logic control".
I work with robotics everyday, and while its nice to see theories advancing, this method is still not there yet. I don't think that there is enough computing power to take on a very large model. Program complexity, or better object control complexity will grow with each object added, until the time to calculate the correct move in a critical situation would exceed the point of no return.
There's no need to be like that. I'm sorry I posted in an inappropriate forum, and I've learnt my lesson. Some KDE related place would obviously be better.
Still, you really hurt me with that response, which was far more bitter and venomous than was required. It quite ruined my evening, and can't have helped anyone else.
I'll tell you what. We've both got problems that upset other people. I'll stop posting stupid questions to Slashdot, and you stop being nasty like that. Deal?
The huge number of posts that this is stupid proves that most Slashdoters are posers rather than real programmers! While the naming of immobots is rather silly, the concept is truly profoud and is another small step on the road to AI. Imagine if PC systems had the same abilities. They would be less buggy, more reliable. Programming would become training the AI rather than debugging pages of code. I like it when the moderators post stuff like this--otherwise I would never find it. Thanks!
Yeah...uh huh...right. Immobile Robots.
Show me some code. Surely there's some sort of software model and code to illustrate this idea?
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root@aio:~# nmap -sX -iR -p1- # Ho, ho, ho! Merry Xmas, everyone!
but that doesn't make it robotics.
...
..."
if someone comes along and says: i want to build a sewage treatment plant where A, B and C are self-regulating and the entire system requires a minimum of human supervision, then that's an engineering problem. there are people you'd probably hire to stake out the requirements, to engineer and then to implement the system. maybe even a fair bit of research to push the envelop.
but d00d, its very unlikely you'd hire a robotocist to do that. not even one who watched an episode of "spock's brain" and got the idea that ideas from robotics research could maybe be redeployed almost anywhere else
anyone but the most self deluded - or maybe one pushing really hard for some grant money - would have at least paused to ask himself: "hey, maybe the fact that i'm claiming that all of this stuff we use in robotics isn't actually 'just robotics' means that its stuff that folks in those other areas actually know and use already (without the hype of course), rather than assuming that robotics has somehow solved all the problems of embedded systems that nobody else had ever thought of before
arrogant academic, i'd say. "immobot". i like the name "smart pickle" better.
Thank you for writing your comment. If I had any moderator points left, I'd definitely mod you "+1 Informative". I see that between the time I downloaded the comments page and the time I downloaded the reply page, you've been modded up so now you're at four. Hopefully, you'll get to five soon. :-)
:-)
I've never heard of "control theory" before but since I have a CS degree, I probably should have. It sounds very interesting. It's nice to know there are systematic methods for attempting to keep control of complex systems other than just periodically asking the question, "is it still on?".
Also, thanks for clearing up the "immobot" crude. I went to the "Check this column for details" link but it had been simplified to the point that there was no technical info in it. (Nothing left... Like if you take the derivative of a polynomial too many times: you always get f(x)=0.) So it was impossible to determine if they were actually telling me something or just saying, "Wow! Technology's cool, you bet!!" I hate when that happens.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Come on, that was funny. Maybe off topic, but not unfunny. I bet the guy didn't even follow the link. Or maybe he's a MS lackey. Either way, it's bad karma, eh? That's where real karma does a better job of judgement than /. karma.
"... being a Linux user is sort of like living in a house inhabited .sig of Rob Riggs, rriggs@tesser.com
by a large family of carpenters and architects. Every morning when
you wake up, the house is a little different. Maybe there is a new
turret, or some walls have moved. Or perhaps someone has temporarily
removed the floor under your bed." - Unix for Dummies, 2nd Edition
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