Slashdot Mirror
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."
This could have immediate application for the disabled. Imagine a personal moving device like the segway that walks around with technology derived from insects. It'd be pretty cool I'd say.
Maybe a mars rover that doesn't faller over or get stuck
There are lots of possible uses of data from this research.
Does anyone know how this differs from the insect-like robots (like Hannibal and Attilla) developed by Rod Brooks' group in the MIT AI Lab? It's been a while since I took his class, but I remember that they found that remarkably simple distributed control systems could be used to generate adaptive legged locomation patterns without requiring complex centralized control.
Could it be possible that a computational approach isn't necessarily the way to go?
See, for example, the work of Mark Tilden
http://www.exhibitresearch.com/tilden/
Psychology News
I discovered this by reading the story about RHex here.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
"Adding a robust perception loop around the sense-response robot is the way to go, as far as I'm concerned."
Agreed. In fact, that was one avenue the BEAM folks and Mark Tilden began exploring. Their take was to develop a solid sense-response sub-layer, and then layer on the computing systems.
The BEAM name for the architecture was Horse-Rider.
J Wolfgang Goerlich
you're definitely not going to contribute any more to society.
Riiight. As if contributing to society is what we should all be striving for, sacrificing self-interest on the altar of saintly altruism. They teach you that crap in school nowadays?
In any event, our friend here might be 'contributing to society' by pointing out that the $30 million dollars could be better spent elsewhere. Especially if it's $30 million in TAX dollars, in which case I agree with him.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
A lot of work in the walking robot field is going into dynamic stability - at least in U.S. academia. The various bipedal robots produced by the Japanese corporate world (Asimo, for example) are all statically stable - meaning that the center of mass is always kept directly over the support base. If you watch videos of those robots carefully, you'll see that this is the case.
Animals don't work like that. In fact, human walking gait is often described as continually falling forward, saved only by the swinging foot meeting the ground before you face-plant. As for insects, some gaits are statically stable simply by virtue of having so many legs, but the info posted by the parent concerning cockroaches using dynamic stability in tripod gait is really interesting.