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Self-Introspecting Robot Learns to Walk
StCredZero writes "There's something about these things that seems eerily alive! The Starfish Robot reminds me of the Grid Bugs from Tron. But it's very real, and apparently capable of self introspection. In fact, instead of being explicitly coded, it teaches itself how to walk, and it can even learn how to compensate for damage."
I have to agree, even if I am not sure how I would define life. It would be interesting if the software element of this could be used in conjunction with biological hardware, or hardware with biological traits (i.e. replication and energy production). It seems to me that having a central control mechanism (brain) for all large scale operations plus small independent modules for specific tasks would be a close approximation to biological life (less complete reproduction, although I suppose that may be possible at some point albeit more complex)
but come on! "Update 24-Nov-2006:"
This is a very well-done video. I really like how it shows the virtual model to illustrate how the system 'sees' itself. Self-reflection of a sort is usually present in most complex programmed systems in one form or another - usually in terms of disjointed status variables and variables for their hard-coded implications. This is neat because the implications can be a little more dynamic.
I hope this becomes a more general library that can be used to help self-reflection of this sort become a more separate part of physical designs. Even if the implications of the physical model aren't dynamic, a standard way of quickly seeing how your model 'sees' itself would help debugging and development in many future projects.
The only problem if it becomes more prevalent would be same one that quantum mechanics holds - people think that 'observer effects' has to involve consciousness, in the same way they'd think that a program's self-reflection would mean that it 'thinks' the same way they do. Neither is true - they're all mechanical terms wrapped in common language. Anything that can record an effect on the world (a falling rock's scratches in another stone would work) is a quantum observer - consciousness has nothing to do with the 'collapsing wave function'. The same here - a bit of self-reflection on the part of a program doesn't mean it's eerie self-corrections are capable of the complexities of our mind. If anything, such mechanical results would imply that our own minds act simpler in some ways than we may think, and that consciousness doesn't necessarily have to be as inscrutable and special as we might want.
Ryan Fenton
That thing almost looks alive. After seeing it, it reminded me of the nurses in Brookhaven Hospital trying to move. Eew.
Well, it seems to me that combat really isn't a good time for too much introspection. I mean with all the bullets flying and all.
2. Can it contemplate it?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
it's obviously going to latch onto somebody's face and then they'll say it learned fast.
Supposedly a mine-clearing bot (lots of legs designed to be blown off by mines, the bot just walks around and triggers them) that was literally on its last leg was pulled out of the testing (it would have crawled onto a final mine and be destroyed in the process) because the supervising officer felt sorry for it. People are capable of feeling empathy for the dumbest animals, why wouldn't they for a robot?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
First, get past the blogodreck to the actual work. (Slashdot editors missed a blog troll again.) Also, this work is several years old. The papers are from 2004 to 2006.
The original article says that the robot has "tilt and angle sensors in all its joints", but that's wrong. It only has one central tilt sensor. That's significant, because if it did have tilt sensors at each joint, system identification would be easier. The algorithm is doing better than one might expect.
This thing is doing what controls people call "automatic system identification". You have some set of sensor inputs and some set of control outputs, and the control system has to figure out how they relate. It does this by adjusting the outputs and watching what happens. There are various statistical techniques for doing this. Calling this "introspection" isn't really correct.
After system identification, the model is inverted, or solved for the inputs in terms of the outputs. The inverted model can then be used as a controller. Given desired outputs, the inputs needed to achieve them can be computed.
The novel result here is that a reasonably decent system identification for a nonlinear system is being performed with a small number of physical tries. That's an improvement over previous methods, which tended to "learn" very slowly. I'd looked at approaches like this for legged locomotion in the past, but the available system identification algorithms weren't good enough. This looks promising.
Good robotics work, crap Slashdot article.
Link to the research group at Cornell: http://ccsl.mae.cornell.edu/research/selfmodels/ Lots more pics, movies, and details.
...be called a herd?
...is to make it capable of autonomous self- introspection.
This space available.
Once it learns there's so much damage he can take, he'll know pain. From there is straight to world domination.
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!