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Cyberbees Score MIT Prize
DeAshcroft writes "The Boston Globe has a nice story on the winner of this year's Lemelson-MIT Student Prize. 125 infrared-communicating 4.5-inch swarming bee-like robots. Businessweek even covered this one here.
Next year's prize may go to the creator of 4.5-inch long swarming cockroaches."
...for the killer bees to come to us when we can make them ourselves.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
he uses the robot fleet for good. for example sending the fleet over a city and have them steal every Microsoft cd in sight, replacing them with Debian GNU/Linux cd's.
You're here to steal my robot bee, aren't you!
Ahh, but can they too survive nuclear winter?
"MIT" and "score"
How about the Metrobots that are Sony AIBO robots used as embodied multi-agent systems that play robotic soccer too.
They are planning to enter the RoboCup American Open at CMU in Spring of 2003 and hoping to participate in RoboCup 2003 in Padua Italy.
Suhit
"James McLurkin and a few assistants built 125 wheel-footed bugs... The machines measure 4.5 inches on a side and communicate with the same infrared technology used by television remote controls."
You need a MIT Doctor to figure out the Lego Mindstorm kit?
From the article :
Sandra Lawson, McLurkin's mother, figured out she had a gifted child at age 2 when her boy stuck a french fry up each nostril during lunch and said, ''Look mom, I'm a walrus.'' Though unimpressed by his nasal hygiene, she was astounded her child knew what a walrus was.
He then smeared the rest of his food all over his face and listed three more Beatles songs.
Sandra wept and thought : 'My boy is truly a genius'.
MODS OC!
Sandra Lawson, McLurkin's mother, figured out she had a gifted child at age 2 when her boy stuck a french fry up each nostril during lunch and said, ''Look mom, I'm a walrus.''
That's weird. When I see a kid with something stuck up his nose, 'gifted' isn't exactly the word that comes to mind. It's more like 'doofus'. The only sign of genius would be that he didn't eat the fries afterward.
Those damn news sites! Why don't they ever have pictures of cool stuff?????? Man, I want to see these little guys zipping around, maybe an avi =)))))) Sounds like the ultimate geek toy.
Sandra Lawson, McLurkin's mother, figured out she had a gifted child at age 2 when her boy stuck a french fry up each nostril during lunch and said, ''Look mom, I'm a walrus.''
I remember when, for some unknown reason, I stuck a little wheel from a Matchbox car up my nose and said "Look mom, I'm a Pep Boys." I didn't really say that. If I was a genius I might have said something like that.
I do remember that 4 people had to hold me down at the hospital. I screamed at the top of my lungs as the doctor came at me with what seemed like a meter long pair of tweezers. I think I know what people that have gone through an alien abduction might have felt, but from the other end.
Community college, here I come!
Between genius and insanity
And that course... Now he can buy a girlfriend.
Half a robot bee, philosophically,
Must, ipso facto, half not be. But half the robot bee has got to be Vis a vis, its entity. D'you see?But can a robot bee be said to be
Or not to be an entire robot bee When half the bee is not a robot bee Due to some ancient injury?La dee dee, one two three,
Eric the half a robot bee. A B C D E F G, Eric the half a robot bee.Is this wretched demi-robot bee,
Half-asleep upon my knee, Some freak from a menagerie? No! It's Eric the half a robot bee!Fiddle de dum, Fiddle de dee,
Eric the half a robot bee. Ho ho ho, tee hee hee, Eric the half a robot bee.I love this hive, employee-ee,
Bisected accidentally, One summer afternoon by me, I love him carnally.He loves him carnally,
Semi-carnally."Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
"A 30-year-old MIT doctoral student won $30,000 yesterday for designing a swarm of little robots..."
Which covers what, about 1 semester at MIT?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
You know it's gonna happen.
The Lemelson Foundation was created by Jerome Lemelson, one of the more polarizing figures in modern day patent life. Lemelson obtained more than 500 patents in his life. He did not use these patents to create companies geared toward manufacturing products, however. Instead, he filed lawsuits against a number of companies, including General Motors and Otis Elevator, when elements of his designs allegedly showed up in later products such as bar-code scanners.
Settlements and verdicts in the more than 135 so-called Lemelson lawsuits led to millions for Lemelson and his allies.
This could be taken out of context but the sounds suspiciously like this guy was a patent squatter (although I assume these were legitimate as opposed to the ones ignoring prior art we keep hearing about).
I stole this Sig
The idea of complex adaptive systems composed of a swarm of simple nodes with very simple rules is neither new or interesting in and of itself. The fact that this garnered a prestigious award and some press is made all the more disturbing because I've seen more than one software proof-of-concept for this idea in the past five years.
My favorite was a Java-based applet called "Ants" where each entity only 3 rules...
1. where home was
2. what it "liked" (food)
3. communicate food locations to peers when contact was made
Within 20 seconds, the entire "colony" had been notified of the food location and the ants were swarming in a straight line between the colony location and the "food."
I hate it when something that is neither novel nor compelling wins a prize like this...
Hell, my father-in-law thought of this idea for a lawnmower grid, even...
"... but you can love completely without complete understanding." - Norman Maclean, "A River Runs Through It"
If you read the article you'd see this geek actually used to put up french fries in his nostrils. Still, he wonders why he was consideed geek in his neighborhood; man, this dude deserves the prize.
Just wait until they turn this into a distribution system for chemical weapons or a way to conduct surveillance in cities. A swarm of the other side's robots coming at you? I'd either be running for cover or pulling out the shotgun, depending on how many there were. Great...
You know it's the Golden Age of awards shows when even God makes an appearance at some b-list event like this.
This guy made his money from bar-code scanners' patents (and lawsuits). Still his is "one of the larger student grants in the country"
...kicked the ground in unison and took their stinking RED ribbon and wouldn't give their parents a hug.
Robot parents report they were testy whenever any of their robot friends asked how the meet went.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
My DICK, your EYE!
It works on so many levels
Hey I learned to use an old 80's vcr when i was 18 months old. And he's gifted for knowing what a walrus was. Damn, I must be the next einstien :-)
Robotic ants inventor James McLurkin wins $30K Lemelson student prize
this project must of cost this guy alot of money, even if he won 30k from MIT, what good is it when he has to pay for school, and pay for the parts?
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
You have to know how to spell "Al Gore" and "dense wave-division multiplexing" and every word in RFC 1180? What's the prize for winning?
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
" . . . making him, he says, the neighborhood geek in a black culture where adolescents rewarded only athletes and tough guys."
I don't know how to respond from this observation in the article. On one hand being a "geek" in middle/high school really sucks. On the other hand, is it "black culture" that doesn't like geeks, or "white" culture that has traditionally railroaded blacks into those two categories? I definitely don't want to play the race card here. I just thought the observation in the article was interesting.
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
Like that doesn't exist already? (And for a long long time.) On the bright side, maybe the patent office will still patent their idea? *sigh* It still won't work, of course: Trying to get a lawyer to serve cockroaches, hell, most of them already serve cockroaches.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
.. was an ant colony at MIT. He's probably using something about the same for his 125 robot swarm.
Take a look at:
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/ants/
It's really quite interesting how they're designed, even if the tech is from a few years back.
Too bad there aren't any websites showing the new ones? Or are there?
-m_xiphias
i went to the the mit website when they showcase the robots, link
i downloaded a few of the videos and was not that impressed. i am sure there is a lot of time and effort put into this, but i worked a summer camp where we taught kids a half of the things they were show casing... this company sells little robots and we can even buy little ifrared recievers imiters, light sensors, etc. we program it with BASIC to follow the light/dark, take commands from a remote control, pick things up. all this for just a 200bucks.
now, many of the "crown control" things were odviously a bit more complicated. but is it THAT special? sending signals that push away or get closer to other bots.. not that new.
one thing that i must say is that programming for these premanunfactured bots is easy, but if you ever try to linux-fy, and tweak, or play with the goodies inside, goodluck. Me and friend tried to make a linux compiler for it, and got no support from the company, no techdoc, nothing. (we were not surprised)
what is nailchipper?
If the guy had just started working out of college he'd have a lot more than 30000$ and a bunch of robots to show at 30 years old.
Freak probably still lives with Mum&Dad.
Still, it's better that a white guy won this than a Chinese, who live packed like sardines in a one bedroom apartment, who live only for school. Hard to compete with a 45 year old frustrated virgin chinese guy who has nothing else to do.
First, I read the post, which talked about 'Bee-like robots', and was impressed. Making anything that flies under its own power and contains some kind of logic is pretty clever, and incorporating swarming algorithms is even better. Then I read the article (yes, I know this is /., I'm sorry, it won't happen again). I don't know about the US, but in the UK bees have wings, and fly. These were just ground crawlers. About 3 years ago, I saw something similar at Oxford Uuniversity, I think it was an undergrad's final year project. They used slightly bigger robots, but the principle is the same. This really isn't a new idea, and does not merit a prize. Flocking algorithms have been around for ages (we had to study them as part of a second year course) and small robots can by bought in Toys 'R' Us. Combining the two would be a good high-school project, but there's nothing particularly original in this work (at least as portrayed by the article).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
4" long robots, communicate via IR, sound familiar?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
As for the "next Einstein", let's just see if you're Y21-safe yet.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I'd like to see these pissy bee-bots bringing a hyperdrive to 800% efficiency. Or evolving into cellular units that are invincible even to our projectile weapons.
Pah.
Umm, their excellent work in the field, and, umm, the work on swarming worms and zombie DDOS attacks wouldn't have been the same without them.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Are you talking about the Parallax robots powered by BASIC Stamps? Those are standard PIC microcontrollers. If StampBASIC isn't good enough for you you should be able to directly replace the PIC with the StampBASIC microcode interpreter with a plain one and program it in machine language. I believe there is even a C compiler for the PIC.
As for compiling to StampBASIC p-code there isn't much point; you'd still have a very limited instruction store and you'd still be limited to the functions supported by the p-code interpreter, which are quite primitive.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Those aren't bugs... they're features!
Learn to Play Go
He is a patent squatter. Read, for instance,
3 29 1,00.html?
this Fortune magazine article.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,37
Nice to know the money's doing some good though.
Cyberbees Score MIT Prize
:)
I don't see what all the buzz is about...
*bah* *dum* *cha!*
thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week
''Socially, I suffered tremendously. I couldn't have bought a girlfriend in high school. But I survived by sensing I was on a different course from my peers,'' McLurkin said. ''I knew I had a future.''
At least he isn't bitter...
I'd be more impressed if their comm link wasn't foiled by little things like line-of-sight.
Infrared = no progress for most applications, e.g. exploring earthquake ruins.
Queens of the Stone Age - they rule
A beowulf cluster of those swarms.
Ooooh.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
''Socially, I suffered tremendously. I couldn't have bought a girlfriend in high school. But I survived by sensing I was on a different course from my peers,'' McLurkin said. ''I knew I had a future.''
30 years old, still in school, and won 30k for building a hobby type robot and then duplicating it 124 times. Ya, on a different course alright, the rest of his peers have been working in the real world for 26 years, and have made 40x his prize money in real income. Plus most are married and like to be social.
His mommy sure can be proud of the french fry walrus now.
So I guess these devices, like most living things, would be attracted to this then... :)
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
Hardly a waste. This man has his masters degree, and is on his way to getting his doctorate, from MIT no less. Far more than your average 30 year old.
Im not sure where you came up with 26 years for how long his peers have been working in "the real world", but Ill go with it. So, 30k * 40 = 1.2mil...spread that out over 26 years, and thats only a little over 46k a year.
Meanwhile, by the time this man has 26 years of "real world" work experience, he will be pulling in well over 46k a year with his masters, let alone a doctorate. As the article indicates, he has already taught civil engineering at MIT, is the lead scientist at iRobot, and winning this award will only give the company better recognition.
As for it being a hobby type robot, that would only make it all the better. Noone would turn down 30k for something they put together as a hobby, let alone thier doctoral thesis.
You also indicate he does not like to be social, and is not married, neither of which are addressed in either article.
At least you got one thing right, his mommy sure can be proud.
Actually, it's logical that the major problem would be the drive system. A slightly larger robot designed for all terrain movement, a faster processor, and RF communications would probably be the way to handle earthquake ruins. What he has demonstrated is something like a protocol for getting the robots to interact, now it just has to be applied to real hardware.
You joke about robot cochroaches, but if you think about it, they might have applications in sewer maintenance. I've seen a rather large cochroach, easily 7 inches long and 3 inches wide squeeze it's way into the mouth of a 2 liter soda bottle I left out on my back porch where I live downtown. If they can get into that, imagine the small spaces they could get into to unblock a sewer pipe or something.
This certainly reminds me of those retina-scanning, robotic spiders in Tom Cruise's "Minority Report."
Also check out this guy's company at iRobot which offers real life robotic product like the "Roomba" - a robotic vacuum cleaner.
I guess we may be only half a century away from commericialized robot similar to Honda's Asimo Humaniod.
I saw an actual demonstration of these by McLurkin a few months ago. What actually impressed me the most about these things was that he used music and sounds to indicate what each robot was doing. He had about 20 of these things running around on the floor, and it's amazing that by just listening to them, you can figure out what's going on. One example was the use of a musical scale to indicate the distance a given robot is from its leader. He said it was a great debug tool in that you can actually hear when there's something wrong... faster than looking at a screenful of log files.
I'm sure that what we're all REALLY afraid of is when those kooky kids at MIT invent robot CRABS. Talk about ants in your pants....
Sell it to the Military.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
There's a lot happening in mobile robotics, but the action is with the smarter machines. DoD is pushing hard on this. Look up "Demo III" and "XUV".
Videos are at the bottom ofu m.ht ml
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/ants/photo-alb
Ok, so it's popular trash literature - but did anyone else who has read Michael Crichton's Prey get a little uneasy after seeing this article?
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
"You want my mechanical bee!"
Daniel Crawford
This MIT article has a photo of McLurkin and the robots