Self-Introspecting Robot Learns to Walk 121
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'm not one to complain about newsworthiness (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Link to the Research Group at Cornell (Score:3, Informative)
Self-introspection (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Poor thing... (Score:1, Informative)