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

How long

[Dorsai65]

before one of the humanoid robots tries to squish it?

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]

also, you can get more info here:
http://www.rhex.net/

look for the great video of the tumble from a pile of boulders, which doesn't seem to be a problem.

I wish I could see ASIMO take a fall like that...and watch the subsequent execution of the grad student who let it happen.

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.

Re:I work on this...

[jwgoerlich]

"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

Practical Applications

[ScArE2100]

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.

This is good news

[Anonymous Coward]

... for real cockroaches. When Armageddon comes, the cockroaches will have robot versions of themselves for slaves.

$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:Easy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Already been done!

The best way to study their movement is to mount railguns on them, and fire them at random, confusing the hell out of the little guys...don't believe me?

http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/205/18/ 1803/i

Check out the picture!

Hannibal and Attila?

[BrewerDude]

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.

Rodney Brooks said it best

[lawpoop]

When an ant walks, it's falling over all the time. The trick is that it catches itself with its legs.

You can get a load of his work from the documentary Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.

Huh?

[bobobobo]

how they move without falling over.

Because they have six legs? Am I missing something here?

RHex is also cool because it swims

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I discovered this by reading the story about RHex here.

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

[Dachannien]

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.

most important feature

[kxmas]

Will it flip on its back when runs out of batteries?

Not the only people doing this sort of thing

[Dachannien]

Read about competitive work here.