Artificial eyes to "monitor areas over 360°" (I wish I knew how area over 360° looks like) in real time, touch sensors that allow feel out the likeness of Abraham Lincoln on a penny, and alcohol-powered muscles that are 100 times stronger than natural muscles, able to do 100 times greater work per cycle and produce, at reduced strengths, larger contractions than natural muscles. What's next?
[via Robots.net and Cognitive Daily]
Microsoft just announced Microsoft Robotics Studio -- a Windows-based environment that includes robotics development platform and lightweight services oriented runtime. The Studio provides simulation runtime and relies on the web services application model to interact with available services (this is especially close to my heart as the two books that I co-authored for O'Reilly were about webservices).
The toolkit currently supports LEGO Mindstorms (both RCX and NXT) and Fischertechnik interfaces.
The discussion group that covers Robotics Studio already has several interesting threads. From one of the messages (slightly edited for presentability); unfortunately I don't see any way to link to a particular message, but you can search for several "Absolute Horror" messages:
Robotics Studio will take your focus OFF the real problem - how to integrate timing into your design. Time is THE most important thing when you design a robot. You can have a dumb cap and resistor running the whole show as in Beam robotics and get great results. The further you abstract your framework and the more you rely on the simulation the more damage you will do to the community. What we really need is a BUS not a framework. And a way to hook up that bus to a PC. We do not need a framework without a bus. Robotics Studio is trying to create a distributed environment where timing will be explicit. These concepts are only applicable to the simple machines most people mistakenly call robots -- these are NOT robots. These are toys. [...] Instead learn the following:
- Everything you can get your hands on regarding oscillations and timing related to oscillations. Forget about traditional NNs - they are made of Layers (just like Ogres - watch shrek 1 for a good explanation) If they weren't made of layers (backpropagation is only good for non-temporal patterns) they just might work... Statistics (corrleation especially). Embodyment. Compliance. Types of learning (Supervised, Unsupervised, Reinforced). Hardware such as Bus design, servos, H-bridges, sensors. Forget PID control - your bot has to learn it otherwise it will not integrate well with the rest of the system.
- One thing I want to tell about amature robotics - the only way you get a complex behaviour is by increasing the number of actuators/sensors. The only way you can do it is by making the devices more affordable. The only way you can do that is by making the devices simpler and standardizing them. Robotics Studio wants to add XML processing to devices which contain 25-128 bytes of ram such as pics... and waist my precious CPU cycles on parsing it. I got one word: forgettaboutit.
Cofing4Fun also has a page dedicated to programming for LEGO Mindstorms (although no articles that cover the new NXT version yet). All this should run on top of Visual Studio Express, which is free.
First issue of Wired in 2006 published a list of The 50 Best Robots Ever. Unfortunately, my favorite robot, Johnny-5, was not on the list, even though the list includes many movie robots. I found it on The Ten Best Movie Robots list.
Out of those robots that were on the list, my favorite is Genghis, a six-legged walking robot created by Rodney Brooks and his team and covered with much detail in Brooks's book FLESH-AND-MACHINES. Its unique (for its time) feature was that it was based on the subsumption architecture (described in more detail in HOW-TO-BUILD-COMPLETE-CREATURES), which provides an incremental method for building robot control systems that link perception to action. This control system is implemented as a set of layers, with each layer progressively implementing more and more complex behavior; robot's macro behavior (following people) arises from many independent micro behaviors (moving legs, balance control, steering, and the like). Conflict resolution happens at the motor command level rather than at the sensor or perception level resulting in coherent, smooth, and, as Brooks calls it in his book, "lifelike" behavior. However, contrary to what the Wired article says, the robot doesn't learn; this behavior is "innate" and doesn't change with time.
Those of you who are interested in first hand experience, can start from one of the kits on the Top 10 Robot Christmas Gift Ideas compiled by the robots.net folks.
update 2006/03/20: Not really best robots, but still related to this topic. A brief overview of various military robots from Developing Intelligence
Lego built a global empire out of little plastic blocks, then conquered the wired world with a robot kit called Mindstorms. So when the time came for an upgrade, they turned to their obsessed fans -- and rewrote the rules of the innovation game.
"We wanted to create robots with more personality. We wanted them to go from being more mechanical to more human."
-- Mindstorms director Søren Lund
With 4 sensors (Ultrasound, Sound, Light and Touch), 3 interactive servo motors and Bluetooth I wonder if it's possible to send robot's raw input to a computer for processing and then send commands back to the robot for execution. Would be interesting to have a simulation based on some real real-time input.
[via O'Reilly Radar]