Does the Octopus Hold the Key To Robot Design?

balancedi writes "Simultaneously controling 8 jointless arms without getting them all tangled up is a neat trick that octopuses do with ease. According to a National Geographic article several researchers from around the world think understanding the octopus holds to key to the optimal robot design."

Comments

So, make slimy and slippery robots. Got it.

[Speare]

The fact that an octopus doesn't get tangled up is probably related to the fact that the arms are (1) smooth, (2) pliable, (3) slippery, (4) oiled/lubricated, (5) immersed in a fluid. The way the arm tapers from large to small probably has some value here, too.

What do you think hair conditioner does? It mostly lubricates the hair strands so it won't get traction and kink up onto other strands.

Are we going to build tentacle robots that are oozing oil along their smooth plasticene actuators? I think I've seen a few Japanese cartoons along this motif...

Sounds like good management or OO encapsulation

[BrettJB]

From the article:

Earlier research funded by the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR) suggests that, to keep the arms from constantly tangling themselves up, each arm has an independent peripheral nervous system and neural circuitry (see related-story link below). This allows the brain to essentially give a command--"Arm Four, fetch that tasty crab crawling by"--and have the arm carry out the order without the brain thinking about it again.

Sounds like good management to me. Management (the octopus) assigns a task to one of their reports (arms). Tell them what to do, but don't micromanage the task.

Or, it sounds like encapsulation. Pass just enough information to the Arm object to communicate the task, and allow Arm's private methods handle the detals of how that task is accomplished.

Re:I could be wrong...

[lawpoop]

Nope. The plural of pus is pedae, so if you want to be a pompous dick, you would say "octopedae" --

But, since octopus is actually an English word (regardless of where we got it from -- we borrow words, not grammar structures), it takes the regular plural of all English words that end in an -s, -es.

C'mon. Is the plural of sauna saunaa or saunat? A lot of our words come from other languages. If we have to adopt their pluarlization rules, that would be a nightmare laundry list of irregular plurals.