Slashdot Log In
Self-Introspecting Robot Learns to Walk
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat Sep 01, 2007 09:20 AM
from the dreaming-of-electric-sheep dept.
from the dreaming-of-electric-sheep dept.
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."
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
I'm not one to complain about newsworthiness (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I believe that we will eventually create true self-replicating machines. It may even be one of the next important steps in the progression of computer technology (Boolean Logic, Relay, Tube, Transistor, IC, Microprocessor, Self-modifying code...)
Where it gets controversial is that I think that we could see it in the next 50 years or so. (That is, a self-replicating organism that can m
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Self-replicating function here is essential because it covers repairs, and those will be essential. Besides, it might be difficult to send more than a handful of robots ahead of time, and definitely not thousands.
Re: (Score:2)
Take the Mars base as just one of a big class of problems. Obviously, the robots can't just be capable of self replication. They have to self replicate up to useful numbers, and then do other tasks. Once that very general model is applied, refining it is mostly a matter of efficiency, and that efficiency determines whether the project will ultimately be funded or not.
Self-reflection, literally! (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Philosophers like Daniel Dennett agree with this notion. Consciousness may simply be a more complex continually-running predictive model like that used by this robot.
Re: (Score:2)
Dennet objects to the notion of "qualia" - the experiential bits that make up seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. He says that these qualia don't really exist as special things, since adjusting qualia and adjusting the circuits that supposedly generate qualia conceptually achieve the
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Self-reflection, literally! (Score:5, Insightful)
Oddly enough, you could not conceive of anything without consciousness. Understanding is a mental, not physical process. You could however conceive of consciousness without the physical world. Indeed every culture has been doing so for all of recorded history in the form of spirit worlds, afterlife, etc.
Occam's razor can be much abused depending on how you frame your observation. "I think therefore I am." is much more straight forward than "I am incredibly complex and elaborate, therefore I think." Let's set Occam's Razor aside for this discussion, it doesn't seem to be the right tool for the job here.
If you allow yourself to view the conscious world as more fundamental than the physical world, then the observed consistency/connectedness of all physical phenomena would require some sort of governing over-consciousness that is responsible for the physical world. That of course would be a form of creationism, much reviled here on
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
His point would probably be better made by saying: As far as we know, natural selection could have produce life that had purely mechanical "thought processes", like a world populated by computers.
"I think therefore I am." is much more straight forward than "I am incredibly complex and elaborate, therefore I think."
The facts that I exist and that I think is very obvious to me, but that doesn't make it a more basic truth, or show t
Re: (Score:2)
Please. Even philosophy class needs more than "here's a cool way of looking at things".
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Understanding is a mental, not physical process.
You are assuming that they are independent, when in fact there is lots of evidence that mental processes depend on physical processes. There are drugs to alter your consciousness, physical damage to your brain can cause mental damage, and there are experiments where people's thoughts have been maninpulated by direct electrical stimulation (these people were undergoing brain surgery).
That of course would be a form of creationism, much reviled here on /.
Because it doesn't explain anything or offer any evidence.
Re: (Score:2)
Occam's razor applies whether we have proposed mechanisms or not, the whole point of the thing is to help you make a good guess when none of the theories you have seem very complete or easily testable. If we knew every detail, we wouldn't need to use a
Re: (Score:2)
The video is still extra-impressive though, as the robot uses sensors to detect it's own shape and limitations, and then (it looks like) loads it into breve where the thinking seems to happen. Pretty cool indeed.
Re: (Score:2)
CAPTCHA: prophet. Dammit, I wanted PROFIT!
Creepy (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Poor thing... (Score:2)
Argh, I said that and had a sudden mental image of hordes of animal rights activists protesting the mistreatment of robots.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
break all its legs off, post it on youtube (Score:2)
This robot moves in a fluid way, almost like a living creature would, many people will immediately anthropomorphize it.
--
What I find interesting is applications in todays world. How about equipping cars with abilities to sense its physical parts and build a total model of itself in real time. This could be used for immediate diagnosis of problems with the car itself and with its interaction with the surrounding environment. Many p
Re: (Score:2)
It seems to me that in the context of artificial intelligence that word represents a set of values in the guise of a representation of some unspoken, well-defined set of characteristics that separate humans from whatever it is one is comparing humans to. It conveniently disposes of the really hard problem of establishing what it is that sets humans apart in a very neat linguistic package.
In other words, use of the word "anthropomorph
Re: (Score:2)
The car makers using dynamic stability control [wikipedia.org] would beg to differ, amd IMHO the system qualifies as a kind of "introspection" for cars.
Don't like the look of this one bit. (Score:2, Insightful)
Hope it doesn't figure out how to circumvent the remote-control kill switch.
Hope it doesn't build a bigger version of itself...
That video scared me. (Score:2)
Seconded!
Watching that video, I got a truly creepy feeling.
Rather uncomfortable actually. Then I thought about it for a little while, and I think the reason was this [movieweb.com].
Let's get that thing a kill switch *first and foremost*, and *then* think about imparting sentience.
Two questions... (Score:5, Funny)
2. Can it contemplate it?
dreaded beast (Score:3, Funny)
Skipping the blogodreck, here's the real info (Score:5, Informative)
First, get past the blogodreck to the actual work. [cornell.edu] (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.
False Accusation. Owed Apology! (Score:2)
I posted the blog entries about the Starfish Robot because it was a good and useful summary. If you don't think so, then that's fine. Just don't go falsely ascribing motivations and intentions!
I've been a Slashdot reader and commenter for many years now. (Lost count. Over 5?) This
And it proves it's all about pattern matching (Score:2)
By the way, this thing proves evolution one more: by trial and error, living entities have been developed...
Re: (Score:2)
Don't misconstrue me, I'm closer in belief to your thoughts on this. But it doesn't prove the big questions you're alluding to in your post. It simply brings us one step closer to showing that all the amazing properties of life are not dependent on some mystical, impossible to fully comprehend entity, but can be mechanistically created.
Even
Link to the Research Group at Cornell (Score:3, Informative)
Self-introspection (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I thoroughly enjoyed the eery feeling that (Score:2)
If the robot had come with some elastic (but NOT flesh colored) rubber skin, instead of looking like a meccano set, it would have been almost cute.
They should try different orientations for the 'shoulder/hip' attachment, give it a longer brain/body and a spotted outer covering (with sensors in the 'skin",) a need to home to an electrical outlet to recharge, and make a toy out of it.
After an initial charge "through" the box, you open
not new (Score:2)
So would a beowulf cluster of these.... (Score:4, Funny)
The next step... (Score:4, Funny)
Compensate for damaga (Score:3, Interesting)
Dinosaurs (Score:2)
Prior RoboArt (Score:2)
That said, the device in TFA is not novel, nor is it as simple as previous designs. Far simpler microbots have been built wi
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Damage (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)