Cockroach-Like Robot to Help Explain Animal Movement

neutron_p writes "A cockroach-like robot named RHex is the starting point for a major project to understand animals' most distinguishing trait: how they move without falling over. Researchers from several universities will focus on RHex, a short, six-legged robot that scampers like a cockroach, as a working model of the principles they're seeking to uncover. By tweaking the robot and using it as a physical model, they hope to tease apart the complex neural and muscular networks in insects."

Comments

duh...

[niteice]

They don't fall over because they (usually) aren't missing a leg where one is needed for proper balance.

I work on this...

[feelyoda]

on the perception side...

While the ability of the bot to go over hard terrain is amazing, the point is that your relinquish direct control.

The basic problem in perception is dealing with the drastic motions.

The computer vision methods needed are quite complicated, requiring complimenting sensors like inertial measurement devices. Also extremely wide-angle cameras are excellent because things stay in view, but difficult because the pin-hole model fails.

Go here for some work that is now a bit dated, from a 180degree camera strapped to rhex:
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/buzzard/ rhex/

Re:I work on this...

[feelyoda]

"Could it be possible that a computational approach isn't necessarily the way to go?"

As Brooks showed, you can get very complicated behavior from reactive or even semi-stateful robots. BUT, I would question the scalability to something more application specific and useful.

For instance, imagine such a bot making a sandwich, and then cleaning your toilette...

Also, as some point, you're going to want to give the bot an order, like go from A to B to C then back. Rhex would be unable to do that currently without a very engineered environment, which goes against the entire point of such a bot which moves skillfully in all environments.

Adding a robust perception loop around the sense-response robot is the way to go, as far as I'm concerned.

$30M for more insect robots? Sounds like pork.

[Animats]

There's way too much work on insect-level locomotion. Brooks was doing this stuff twenty years ago, and took it about as far as it's going to go. Reactive systems reached their ceiling years ago.

We realy should be doing better than this. We should at least have Aibo-type robots running (or at least trotting) over real terrain by now. It's embarassing.

The trouble with this insect stuff is that you can do crap work and get published. If you do work on robots that really balance, you look stupid if your control system doesn't work. Everyone can see you failed. With insect robots, failure is less obvious. Some people think this is a feature.

Re:$30M for more insect robots? Sounds like pork.

[gl4ss]

cockroaches are basically reactive animals.

and uh, what is the "we should have.." based on? wishes? according to scifi we should have flying cars, that however doesn't make them technically feasible(or possible at right price) at the moment.

Re:$30M for more insect robots? Sounds like pork.

[Indras]

Brooks was doing this stuff twenty years ago, and took it about as far as it's going to go.

Yes, how insightful. Everything that could ever be discovered in this particular field has been. It's time to close the books on this forever. Every time I hear this kind of comment, it sets off my "idiot" alarm.

My favorite was from my professor in Applied Electricity. We were in the second week, going over Ohm's Law, I asked how the equations worked when the resistance dropped to zero, like in a superconductor. He said that it was impossible to have no resistance in a wire, "super" conductors cannot exist. (He even used his fingers to make quotation marks in the air when he said "super," because he'd never heard the word before). This was two months ago.

Basically, any time you think that any single topic has been completely explored, and there's nothing left to learn is probably when you're the most wrong. It's the sign of a closed mind, you might as well sell everything, quit your job, and move into a cabin in the mountains, you're definitely not going to contribute any more to society.

Until I see a robot that is entirely indistinguishable from a real insect, there's still more left to explore. In fact, even then, there's more left to do, like miniaturization, self-replication, and so on ad infinitum.

Re:$30M for more insect robots? Sounds like pork.

[jamesh]

Why spend billions to create synthetic robotic psuedo lifeforms when the actual humans themselves are so absurdly cheap

Because if you send them to another planet they'll either explode (no atmosphere) or disolve (corrosive atmosphere).

And if you put them in spacesuits and send them there, they won't necessarily do what you tell them to.

Biggest application: NASA

[mblase]

There's way too much work on insect-level locomotion. Brooks was doing this stuff twenty years ago, and took it about as far as it's going to go.

I don't think that's true. There was an article in Discover a month or two ago (can't find it online, sorry, but I believe it parallels the linked article) where a researcher was trying to tease more information out of a cockroach's walk, discovering that it doesn't actually use a three-feet-down-all-the-time approach but wobbles side to side, remaining dynamically stable as it walks. This is not what you might intuit by simply watching insects walk.

As for "too much" being done, I must disagree. Walking robots aren't as good as they can be or it'd be perfected by now. Wheels are faster, but only over ideal terrain; complicated terrain that would confound the best wheels can often be navigated by legged animals. NASA's interplanetary rovers all use wheels, and all of them eventually encounter situations where they're useless, so if they could deploy a robot lander that could walk effectively (and efficiently), it'd be of tremendous value to them.

Re:Biggest application: NASA

[awtbfb]

... robot lander that could walk effectively (and efficiently)...

Efficiency is the crux of the problem. Legs are incredibly inefficient compared to wheels and until the on-board power problem is handled in an acceptable manner, you won't see a lot of legged robots too far away from an outlet.

Having said that, this is where RHEX shines. Since the legs spin like wheels they have a real advantage compared to traditional walking robots in power savings. As an aside, the thing also moves pretty fast. Again, an advantage over most walking robots and a lot like a wheel oriented solution.

Oh yeah, kids and dogs love it too. It was like the pied piper at a demo day earlier this summer.

Re:Incredible

[achurch]

I'm truly amazed, that with all the modern science we have today, that we don't know the answer to this question.

And we still may not be getting it. All they've built is a robot that coincidentally can also move without falling over--there's nothing (at least as far as I can tell from the article) to say that it works the same way real insects do.

In all fairness, though, the question "how do animals move" is probably less important than "how can we get robots to move". While learning how the biological systems work can certainly provide insight, we don't have to exactly replicate those systems in mechanical robots, and in fact the optimal movement system for a robot may be different from that for an animal. It's sort of like emulating hardware: if you wanted to you could emulate a CPU down to the logic-gate level, but it's much more efficient to just re-interpret instructions into equivalent operations on the host CPU.

Re:robots in space?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody's going to be sending anybody to other planets (outside of few stunts like the moon landings of the 1970s).

Yes, that's pretty much his point. It costs a huge amount to send a human onto another planet, so we can and do use robots. And I hardly think anyone predicting global environmental catastrophies in forty years should be making potshots at others for making broad predictions based on a little data and a lot of guesswork.

Circular argument

[EmbeddedJanitor]

The summary implies that the people who built this robot don't understand how a cockroach works, however they managed to build a roboroach and by studying the roboroach they will gain an understanding of how real roaches work.

Now surely the geniuses behind this would have had to understand the workings of a cockroach to build a reasonable model of one that gives them a reasonable simulation. In this case, they already understand the roach mechanics well and studying the roboroach won't tell them an awful lot.

If one starts from the premise that they know very little about the roach (and will hence learn a lot), then likely their robo simulation is not very good and they will learn bullshit (eg. "we found that the roach works by moving its muscle here", but the roach does not have a muscle there).

I'm getting all tied up writing this but surely other folks see this as a circular argument.