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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.
"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'.
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!
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."
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
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.
" . . . 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.
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
Aye, but it's one thing to have the idea, another to actually knuckle down and make it work.
> 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.
There is a lot of new and interesting stuff going on in that area, tho'
last week's "Nature" (vol 421, p 780) had a news feature on how systems of multiple units achieve synchrony ;
check out Steve Strogatz work ;
read Arthur Winfree's book "The Geometry of Biological Time" (Springer-Verlag 1980) [OK, not so new ...]
This stuff isn't so obvious. Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch physicist, couldn't get the Royal Society to pay attention to his observation that two pendulum clocks hanging on the same wooden beam eventually adopted the same rhythm. That was in 1665. Next stop : the 1960s, when Winfree started looking at coupled oscillators as an explanation for fireflies synchronizing their flashes. Still plenty of stuff to find out here.
I for one don't begrudge a student winning a prize for this.