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Six-legged Robot Teaches Itself To Walk
rabiddeity writes "An undergraduate at the University of Arizona has built a six legged robot from scratch. The robot, which is equipped with sensors on each foot, teaches itself to walk and orients itself via an onboard camera. A similar design might be used to explore unstable environments such as collapsed buildings or rocky landscapes."
"Stumbling around on six legs isn't very hard. "
That link didn't show what stiquito could do. Here's a video.
"2010 is a little late to be doing a six-legged crawler. They're fun to build, but you don't issue a press release."
I think parent is right, seems six-legged robots have been around forever. An electrical engineer senior shouldn't have a problem building one of these without a kit, although it looks like he might have used this kit. Sure the legs look a bit different, but the placement of servos, etc look the exact same, and before someone says "how many different ways can you build a hexapod robot?" there's many different designs
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
This is similar to a stiquito in only the most superficial way -- its a movable machine with 6 legs. In every other way its different.
Controls: The stiquito has a single (or sometimes two) actuators, that are placed to mechanically, repeatedly cause the same walking motion. This student's robot has 12 actuators, 2 joints on each leg. This makes the robot much more versatile, but also makes the control problem much harder to solve.
Learning: A stiquito is dumb -- you attach the SMA to the legs, and put a current through to tighten them. It works exactly the same every time, and you have to put it together in just the right way to make it work. This robot is self-learning (or more exactly, learns through reinforcement). The designer simply creates a fairly simple algorithm that has it try motions and see if it gets it to move in the desired direction, and then learns how to do it over time.
While I think its fair to say anyone with some mechanical aptitude and knowledge of machine learning could put something like this together, its not exactly a simple feat and is certainly impressive for an undergrad. I don't know of any other self-learning six-legged robots (reflecting my ignorance only), but given the capabilities plus the (likely?) low cost its nothing to sneeze at and could have uses in things like disaster operations.
I saw this a few weeks ago when it was emailed to all the students at UA. Here is a video of the guy who made it, and it shows the robot walking around. The video mentions that IBM bought it from him. http://uanews.org/node/29644