Learning Robots

carnun writes "The NewScientist is reporting on a new snakelike robot that uses genetic algorithms to change its motion pattern so that it can still function after sustaining damage." Roland Piquepaille sends in a report about another "learning" robot, named Adam, which is designed to seek out and feed from "flowers".

Comments

Re:Self-healing robots

[I Like Swords!!!]

Uh... self-healing? Can you imagine the trouble that would cause? Just think of what would happen when they become obsolete and you wish to destroy them... oops! They just heal themselves.

Probably a better solution is to make them functional even with significant levels of damage, riddling them with redundant systems that take over where the main systems fail or get destroyed.

Adam rots.

[Chess_the_cat]

Adam is nowhere near a revolutionary robot. It was programmed to recharge itself. It 'learned' two facts: red walls don't recharge, green flowers do recharge. Wow. What is that, 3 lines of code within one IF loop? It moves around randomly and when it touches a wall its energy goes down. When it happens to touch a flower its energy goes up. Now that it knows that its learning is complete. It can't learn anything more. To me, a truly learning robot can learn anything if left alone long enough. Like how to speak, how to pick up a cheque at a restaurant, what the difference between red and blue is, how to get to the store and back. And it would have to learn it all from scratch like a baby would. Adam is way too specialized. He's useless. You might argue that baby steps like this will pay off in the long run but they've been building robots like this since the 1980s. It's If that's a learning robot so is my Roomba.

Revolutionary?

[HolyChao]

I suspect that the author of the article about Adam may have been a bit overzealous when she described the robot as "revolutionary."

First, I have to give Professor Russell credit for some extremely clever names: Adam (ADAptive Mobile robot), and Eden (EDucational ENvironment).

That said, nothing in the article suggests there is anything remarkable about the robot. The most telling line in the article is "Adam was activated with a basic level of competence, which let him know to back off if he hit a wall, and to feed when he saw a flower." That's two very important abilities Adam didn't have to learn.

It is certainly possible that Adam uses some revolutionary AI algorithm, and if so I would be very interested in it, but I have a hunch that Adam is just an exercise in building a basic robot with a basic learning algorithm and a clever naming scheme.

impressive?

[trans_err]

I'm not sure how impressive this really is... maybe i'm missing something, but the algorithm simply learns from it's "mistakes" (ie. if i move this segment and this segment i move this way) and records these mistakes... this is not unlike the basic learning algorithms in some AI's (ie. in the beginning the program starts with a limited amount of knowledge.. a set strategey and learns everytime it makes a move which puts it in a negative situation).. .

or maybe im just bitter.