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New Robot Can Sense Damage, Compensate
AVIDJockey writes "Researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., built a four-legged robot that can sense damage to its body and figure out how to adjust and keep going. They report the development in Friday's issue of the journal Science. The article states that the robot can, 'generate a conception of itself and then adapt to damage.' This reaffirms advice that states that when the robot uprising finally comes, you should always aim your rocket launcher at the head (or brain nexus)."
As a Cornell alumni myself, I am obligated to say "wow, very cool" ... although at first I thought this might be the first incarnation of the omnidroid from The Incredibles.
Cornell has had mixed success in building leading edge robots. Some of their more incredible robots are front and center (such as the work they contributed on the Mars Rovers), while others are barely useful (such as their early dominance in minitiarized robotic soccer). One of the school's oddest robots, which might have helped inspire the compensatory robot in this article, was this rather bizarre chair that could reassemble itself if it happened to fall apart. I don't think I'll be buying any of them for the dinner table!
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This reaffirms advice that states that when the robot uprising finally comes, you should always aim your rocket launcher at the head (or brain nexus)."
That's why any robot worth any title of 'overlord' needs to design itself to use redundant parts, preferably modular and rapidly configurable.
The StarGate creators had a good (if redundant in itself) idea with their 'replicator' race as the main bad guy for a while - only problem is such an enemy quickly forces the need for a, well, deus ex machina as its power grows.
Earlier, the show Lexx had a bad guy using a series of robotic arms that acted in a similar manner, which got so powerful as to entirely destroy one of the two 'universes' that the show took place in. It was impressive, because of the lack of a deus ex machina to fix the, um, daemos ex machina problem. I'm sure countless shows and novels have taken a similar idea before that too.
The future of this idea? Perhaps a Resident Evil game using cyborgs with a shared AI rather than zombies, complete with altering movement for damage? Hey, if everyone can steal ideas from the Thief series, more companies should steal some ideas from System Shock series too!
Ah redundancy - it's everywhere! Likely the mod for this post too.
Ryan Fenton
Mark Tilden, the man behind the Robosapian and the BEAM robotics philosophy has been making robots that can compensate for damaged limbs and keep on functioning for, like, decades now. Oh, and did I mention that he does with with $12 worth of parts.
How we know is more important than what we know.
That'd be the worst USB powered Christmas gadget ever - a mini-robot that screams in pain from the moment it gets plugged in.
:)
I think you've found a gap (albeit a small one) in the market there.
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the F-117 Nighthawk has control systems that work faster than 30 seconds. I was watching a documentary on television about military aircraft and they were flying around in an F-117, and near the end of the flight, the spotter plane said "maybe we should land now." and the pilot of the nighthawk asked why, and the spotter said "because you've lost part of your left wing." The pilot didn't even notice. not because the aircraft's control system knew that part of the left wing was gone, but because it knew that the plane wasn't doing what the pilot wanted it to do, so the control system automatically adjusted the control surfaces to compensate. all aerodynamically unstable fly-by-wire aircraft have these types of systems. it's how an aerodynamically unstable aircraft can fly without the pilot going nuts while correcting and recorrecting the aircraft. If you could put wings and an engine strong enough to lift it, onto the eifel tower, or the statue of liberty, this type of system could keep it stable as it flew.
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Props to Cornell for their impressive work! (and yeah, that chair is just amazing to watch. If only IKEA would license that technology... but I digress.)
I'd like to point out a similar bit of work from about 12 years ago. Different approach, but similar goals: Cynthia Breazeal (Ferrell) (hope I'm spelling that right) did some incredibly impressive work as a Grad student @ MIT in the 90s. The most germain is her paper titled Failure Recognition and Fault Tolerance of an Autonomous Robot
This is a MUST READ paper for anyone interested in building robots which operating in real-time in the unpredictable real world. (Real World. Noun. The place where $#it happens, stuff breaks, sensors get noisy input, etc. and the robot has to "cope" anyway.)
In this paper she describes a methodology for developing a six-legged, insect-like robot, Hannibal [pictures and links], which can adapt to both minor and gross subsystem failures and continue, as much as practical, to fulfill its mission. IMO, the best part is the section talking about adaptive gaits where the robot can change seamlessly from high-speed to high-stability walking patterns, as required, and should one (or more) of the legs becomes inoperable, the robot learns to make due without it prior programming thanks to the subsumption architecture Rod Brooks invented and she and other notable members of the Mobile Robot Labs perfected.
Her work these days is mostly centered around human-computer/robot interactions exploring emotive systems and feedback to bridge the gap.
Yeah, I'm a fanboy.
Unless you consider car engines robots. In which case, they've been compensating for damage in all sorts of ways since the late eighties.
My '91 Audi will compensate for:
...and so on. So, technically, Bosch was there way before these guys with the concept of "take damage and keep going" (which isn't that special...)
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