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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."
Octopuses have intrigued scientists for years, because they have both long- and short-term memory, they remember solutions to problems, and they can go on to solve the same or similar problems. They have been known to climb aboard fishing boats and open holds in search of crabs. They can figure out mazes, open jars, and break out of their aquariums in search of food.
This part of the linked article rang very true for me.
True story:
Octopus are underrated. Seriously. I used to have an (Octopus bimaculoides) as a pet (her name was Cephus, short for Cephalopod) and I was always amazed at the intelligence and problem solving abilities she exhibited. One day I was returning from working all night at the sleep lab followed by a day of class. I had a new bag of goldfish to feed her and placed them in the "goldfish tank" across the table from her 100gal aquarium. She always got excited at that and would hang on the side of her tank and look at the goldfish. At any rate, I got a couple hours of sleep and then ran back to work for another all night shift. Upon stumbling back home the next day, I was stunned to find no goldfish in the goldfish tank! I did not know if I was just seriously sleep deprived or what, but closer inspection revealed goldfish scales floating around in Cephus's tank........and a trail of dried salt water on the table top from her tank to the goldfish tank. She had opened the top of her tank, navigated across the table to the goldfish tank, helped herself to every last goldfish in the goldfish tank and then crawled back home, closing the top of her tank! All I could do was stare in dumbfounded amazement.
She also exhibited curiosity with new objects placed into her tank, exploring them extensively, and I must admit, it is most interesting in that unlike other aquatic non mammalians.....when you looked into an octopus eye, they look back at you. There is something absolutely intelligent behind those eyes.
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Does the Octopus Hold the Key To Robot Design
Even deeper question is, in which arm?
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But I'm more inclined to think that these guys probably have a lot more interesting robotics applications than octopusii do.
Unless they think that making robots taste delicious is the secret to robot movement. Mmm... octopod
Doc Oc has known this for decades. ...in other news, Robotics Scientists often fall asleep during Spiderman movies and have epiphanies in the mornings following.
My prediction: Slashdot article in the near future about the possibility of armored soldiers riding anti-gravity sleds pumped up with performance-enhancing drugs.
Perhaps they can figure out a way to replicate other octopus-like behavior, too. Like, say, squeezing into a bottle half it's size. I mean, that'd be great for all kinds of thing, consider what...
oh, wait...nevermind...
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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...
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The octopus as an optimal robot design? Did none of them see The Matrix?!
Somebody warn them before it's too late!
That green slime had it coming.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/09/09 07_octoarm.html
In that the octopus has a brain hierarchy. The central brain sends a 'go get that food' command to a sub brain in the tentacle which executes commands in the completion of that goal on its own. The main brain doesn't have to think about controlling the mechanics of each arm.
A friend who is a throbbing-brained molecular biologist, with a PhD and everything :), told me this after too many pints of beer.
He was told by the guy from the next lab over, at lunch, who'd heard it from someone in another lab at a party,...
Some behavioural psychologists - I may have their precise taxonomic appellation incorrect - were planning an experiment with an octopus. They had a large maze, constructed of perspex. At one end was the octopus, at the other some food. The idea was just to time how long it took to navigate the maze and get to the food, which different routes it explored and so on. Well, they spent a long day setting everything up, getting the measuring fu in place and so forth. At the end of the day's work, the experiment was ready to run; they'd even connected the aquarium tank with a nice fresh octopus up to the maze equipment. The plan was to unlock the little hatch and give the octupus free access to the maze the following morning.
So they come in bright and early the next day to find the food gone, the octopus fed, and the little hatchway re-locked from the inside...
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
The coolest part about the Movement of Octopus is the fact that only the body desides where to go. It's up to the legs to figure out how they're going to get there.
If you ever get down the the Aquarium of the Americas you can get a pretty good display of this. Just make sure you make it for one of the feeding times 'cause the feeders do all the classic Octopus tricks(fish in a bottle, fish in a tank, fish with mirrors, mazes, etc).
..which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably designed for cooling the blood-T P
It holds, like, 8 of them.
Great!
Now whack it over the head and take it from him. We've been looking for that.
Damn octopi...
Does the octopus hold the key to robot design? I think the more important question is: Does the octopus hold the key to totally awesome robot design?
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
I'm glad to see this. Going into computing from a psycology/neuroscience background, I always found biology to be an excellent source of ideas (or if nothing else, metaphors), for my work.
Nature has already solved many a problem (with some flaws like any solution). It's bad enough to reinvent the wheel. It's worse to reinvent something even more complex.
The sad part is wondering what else is out there that isn't being studied because we didn't think of it yet.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
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.
Smell that? You smell that? Burning karma, son. Nothing in the world smells like that...
(1) smooth, (2) pliable, (3) slippery, (4) oiled/lubricated, (5) immersed in a fluid.
That sounds a lot like the perfect date.
"If you had something--a person, say--floating in a water column or in space, a straight mechanical arm is likely to push it away," said Thomas McKenna, a project officer at the ONR. "But an arm you could use to gently wrap around an object and retrieve it, that would be useful." Also, they are real popular with doe-eyed, psuedo-asian, female superheros.
Lesson on the correct plural version of Octopus. Very interesting read.
Creative Demolition
I don't want a Robot spraying me with Ink!!! Or Did I miss the point of the story ;-)
After reading this startling bit from the article:
Octopuses have intrigued scientists for years, because they have both long- and short-term memory, they remember solutions to problems, and they can go on to solve the same or similar problems. They have been known to climb aboard fishing boats and open holds in search of crabs. They can figure out mazes, open jars, and break out of their aquariums in search of food.
It was a bit disheartening to see this "sponsored link" at the bottom of the article:
A Seafood Delicacy: Order Octopus
Gorton's Fresh Seafood delivers octopus - fully cleaned and freshly prepared. Delicious and mild in flavor - great boiled, stewed or grilled. Special packaging ensures freshness.
Ah, the potential irony of keyword triggered ads!
The FA states:
Just as a human arm has joints at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist that allow our arms to bend and rotate, the octopus bends its arm to forming three segments of roughly equal length.
i wonder how roughly equal the segments were. it would be interesting to know if the difference in lengths correspond to the golden mean, ie coreespond to how our limbs are organized.
(from google) the golden ratio = 1.61803399
There is no generally-agreed plural. Strictly speaking, since it's a Greek word ("Okto", eight, plus "pus", foot) the "correct" plural would be "octopodes". Nobody really likes that, though, and most dictionaries suggest the English neologisms "octopi" or "octopuses". Either is good English usage. (Definitely not "octopii", however, as that would be the plural of "octopius".)
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.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
"It can be intimidating at first, because they wrap their arms pretty tight around you, and everything they latch onto is pretty much headed straight to their mouth"..."But once you get used to it, I can't describe it: They feel like wet velvet or wet silk."
Sounds pretty obscene without the first sentence, doesn't it?