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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."
The exciting thing is that the robot could compensate when part of itself was damaged and get around/over obstacles
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
Isn't this the MSR-H01 Hexapod?
here's the student's video
Here's video of the MSR-H01 Hexapod:
video 1
video 2, at 1:35 it does similar "body wave" movements
The legs look different, but the student does say on that youtube description "This is a demonstration of the new leg design which is much more solid than the previous design."
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
The summary does not do the article justice. This is the first line from the actual article:
The exciting thing is that the robot could compensate when part of itself was damaged and get around/over obstacles
Actually, that's part of the learning algorithms that have been around for a long time. Since it can teach itself to walk, it can re-teach itself with broken appendages.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Rodney Brooks did this at MIT 20 years ago.
This is news how? I'm hoping (didn't read the article) that there is something special in what they've done, cause this is old news.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/robotpg/attilapg/
http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/colt.pdf
http://books.google.com/books?id=VQcCV1VuT_cC&pg=PA71&lpg=PA71&dq=mit+atilla+learns+to+walk&source=bl&ots=n9YkssitMh&sig=zYJ-SRu4KZ7IsWXTPAWeXHVMqCY&hl=en&ei=gZxzS-HeCJCI8Aahg4ydBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CB4Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Haven't history taught you that violence begets violence?
North and South America serve as a shining beacon of disagreement with that claim.
Is that it was impressive enough to catch Intel's attention. It isn't as though this guy was going around to all the news agencies saying "Hey! Look! I made a robot!" No, he made a robot that really impressed his professor. News of it somehow got back to Intel, I suspect his professor probably is friends with someone there, and they said "Wow, that is an amazing little robot. This interests us in particular since it uses our processor." Ok well when a major company is interested in something your university made, you sure as hell put out some information about it. Do remember that universities are having their budgets cut left and right. Might do some good if people were reminded that cool, commercially applicable, stuff can come from them.
Also, if all you saw was 6 legs, well you didn't look very hard. The reason Intel's interest was peaked was the legs, it was how it works. That Stiquito is a simple device, probably a finite state machine, that just does the same thing over and over. Notice that what it has no sensors, just an on/off switch. You turn it on, it follows whatever program is in there to move forward. Not the case with this thing, it uses its camera to see what is happening, and then figures out what to do. It is actually processing data and adapting based on that. Much, much more complex.
He built it for a cognitive robotics class, so the emphasis was on the software, not the hardware (it uses a webcam and optical flow calculation for movement detection, for feedback into the learning algorithm). The FOX article is a horrible source for this story, but if you Google a bit you can find that he used a 3-D printer to build his own legs for the slick version shown - definitely not a kit!