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Cockroach-Controlled Robot
robotsrule writes "The latest issue of Make Magazine volume 2 from O'Reilly publishing has an article on a cockroach controlled robot. Roboticist Garnet Hertz has mounted a Giant Madagascan Hissing Cockroach that drives a small mobile robot around by walking on top of a Kensington trackball. There is a row of proximity sensor triggered LEDs that shine light in the roach's eyes, making him steer the robot since roaches instinctively avoid light. Garnet's web page 'Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine' details the project with several images of the roach in action. Debugging the project is inherently impossible."
It's ambiguous whether the system is controlling the insect or whether she's controlling it.
I, for one, welcome our enslaved, robot-controlling females.
Debugging the project is inherently impossible.
They are obviously not using RAID.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
This research also proved that the roach controlled robot drove better than 86 percent of Southern Californian motorists. Maybe we should all have roaches as chauffeurs.
how kafkaesque.
Make the structure out of Titanium and give it some nukes... Indestructable weapon of the future!
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
They're already in the kitchen -- let's hook them up to the blender and Cuisinart.
Eventually they'll have to switch to lawyers, there are some things even roaches won't do.
If I suddenly found myself in madagascar with a huge piece of velcro on my back, headlights blinking into my eyes, a ball beneath my feet... I would try and run like hell too.
I had an idea for roaches as controllers years ago, but everyone said I was nuts. If I had just ignored my stoner friends, I could have been a pioneer! OK, so I wanted them guiding little rockets, but still...
Great. After nuclear armageddon, the roaches will be free to tool around on the little Segways we made for them. The legacy of man.
They should be using good old American cockroaches instead of them hissy Madagasgadooian roaches. Must outsourcing take away all our jobs?
What's interesting about this is the way it combines biological and machine intelligence. Cockroaches (at least the kind we get here; I've never seen a Giant Madagascar Hissing Cockroach -for which, I heartily thank whatever power there may be) have a fairly complex pattern of behavior; they "understand" finding food, running away from predators, locating good places to hide and live, etc, etc. These behaviors are not easy to model using machine intelligence; at least, not in a way that works in the real world.
Imagine if you could program a cockroach. You have chemical and optical receptors, and the ability to move individual legs and appendages. You have to be able to do things like "go forward" and "eat this object," both of which are quite complex in practice. You also have to answer questions like "is it food" or "is it scary." And you need an overriding program that prioritizes the various items in your environment and decides, at each moment, what you should do next. How many lines of C code do you think this would take? How do you suppose any given program might fare in the real world, competing for resources (and trying to avoid being eaten or stepped on) alongside real cockroaches?
So what if it turns out that real cockroaches are way ahead of the state of the art in machine intelligence - but you find cockroach behavior useful in some potential system? Instead of waiting for AI research to catch up to the cockroach, why not just put a cockroach in the driver's seat and let it run the robot. Treat it as a "black box" heuristic machine. Use machine intelligence only to constrain its behavior.
As to shining a light on the cockroach to get it to run a particular direction, you have to ask: Why not just turn refuse to obey the cockroach's commands if you are going "the wrong way" according to the machine intelligence? I don't know the answer, but I didn't have to face the task of actually building the thing. However, I would imagine it is much simpler to turn LEDs on and off than to get involved in the mechanics of how the legs work.
If you can figure out how cockroaches (or some other control animal) identifies friend and foe, how they focus on a particular target, and what their attack behaviors are, it's entirely plausible that you could use this in a military application. Imagine armored, landscape-destroying robots with giant laser weapons; piloted, perhaps, by kittens. I'm sure this is where the research will inevitably lead.
-Graham