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Robotic Space Workers of the Future
Roland Piquepaille writes "In an article named "Puckish robots pull together," Nature describes the work done at the Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory (PRL) of the University of Southern California on self-reconfigurable teams of robots. There, Wei-Min Shen and his colleagues simulate the absence of gravity by creating a 2D representation of space by using an 'air-hockey table.' With jets of air flow blowing on the surface, the 30 cm-wide robots, working in pairs, evolve in a frictionless environment, pick elements such as girders to assemble structures like if they were in space. NASA will use these teams of autonomous robots to build space systems like 10 km-long arrays of solar panels and other huge spatial structures. You'll find more details, illustrations and references in this overview."
it seems that in the U.S. people really dislike working. they are sending jobs everywhere.
Let's see how these things do in a swimming pool. It's probably a closer approximation to space than an air-hockey table... Astronauts Take a Dive
hi.
A much bigger shortcoming is that this is 2-d instead of 3-d. But then, a ride in the Vomit Comet doesn't come cheap.
It says that these things are able to continue to learn and adapt. I am not an AI expert, but how many mistakes does it have to make before it figures everything out? I have yet to see a machine programmed with every facet of the instincts that might prevent disasters from unforseen situations. Of course, humans make their own mistakes.
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Thank you.
This is the worst thing we could do as humans. IF you want society to fall apart simply make the majority of humans useless. I mean if Robots can do what the average human could do, what the hell is the average human useful for? I guess its time to start slaughtering and killing about 6 billion useless people so we have space for these robots. Don't you agree?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Maybe these scientists know more than I do. . .
I know that when we bought the air hockey table for the physics department we knew what we were doing.
You are correct, it isn't "frictionless," but it is a much closer approximation to frictionless than is, say, a shuffleboard table, which itself is fairly low friction as these things go. It is frictionless enough that if you were to build an airhocky table a mile long you could drive the puck from one end to the other ( for that matter a golf ball has been driven a mile across a frozen lake, which has both more surface friction and air resistence than a puck on an airhockey table).
Having so little friction that miles are inside the bounds of relevant behavior makes yards even more so and remember that Gallileo was able to deduce frictionless behavior by rolling crude wooden balls down crude wooden ramps. You can do this thing called "extrapolating."
Nor is space itself frictionless. It is close enough that one may discuss it in those terms when discussing certain phenomenom, but this too is dealing only in pragmatic approximations.
Stuff doesn't "keep going forever." Space is not empty. Energy is lost throught various "winds" and collisions, just like on an airhockey table. In the real universe "when you bump into something" you often lose energy because real collisions are not ideal, and even light loses energy when it "bumps into something" (like, oh, say, something vaguely blackish). The total energy of the universe is conserved (the universe itself being "the system"), but the total energy of individual objects is not.
The airhockey table itself is an example of this, the puck slows down because it bumps into things and transfers some its energy to that thing. Like the table itself. Which loses energy to the universe.
Think about it, and perhaps you will come to a smaller gap between what you know and what the scientists know.
KFG
Completey OT: I'm surprised this user's name has such a high /. id#. Does a comment from this user automatically invoke Godwin's Law?
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Someone's been watching too many bad sci-fi moovies *cough*alienresurrection*cough*. No to mention too many doom and gloom political manifestoes.
An astronaut against the hole would plug the hole. Vacuum does not suck. Air expands into vacuum. Higher pressure expands into lower pressure. On Earth we call this "weather fronts.
The scene in the movie where the alien is pulled through a tiny hole is utter bullshit.
And the "we have problems here!" argument is tired, old and fallacious.
1. It's not an either/or proposition. We can solve problems on Earth AND do things in space.
2. Many of our problems on Earth are rooted in human nature, and will most likely NEVER be solved, so we might as well advance where we can while we can.
--- Ban humanity.
Let me give some straight facts through all this futuristic market speak in the articles and from my professor. Where are we now?
1. We are trying to do a proof-of-concept that a team of robots can indeed assemble structures together in a near-frictionless environment.
2. We are currently trying to build a triangle out of 3 reconfigurable beams assembled by a pair of tethered robots. With a triangle we can realize more rigid and useful structures such as trusses.
3. We are halfway there. We have achieved two-beam assembly with reconfigurable connectors and everything.
We have been working on this thing for almost a year, and one of the things you might be asking is why is this so difficult?
1. Main issue is connectors. You want to have connectors that can be automatically assembled together yet provided tight tolerances and carry heavy loads. These are often conflicting requirements and this has required a lot of tinkering to accomplish.
2. Reconfigurable connectors. These are connectors that not only automatically connect, but also automatically disconnect. Give the above requirements in 1 and this becomes doubly more difficult.
3. Precision control in a "near-frictionless" yet noisy environment. This is very difficult. Our positioning is kind of crude, our propulsion is non-linear, and the noise in the air-table is not predictable. We've been able to accomplish a lot of our results by using the tether to pull the two robots together and assemble the beams together with a rolling motion.
For those of you who are interested in seeing our latest results I recommend going to the media page at our lab here
The last video (which is surprisingly not up yet) is here
For future reference, the research involved in "evolving and adapting" has not yet been done. That is future work.
Thanks,
Jacob Everist
everist@usc.edu
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wildmage
Memoirs of a Mad Scientist