Six-legged Robot Teaches Itself To Walk 113
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."
Eh... (Score:2, Informative)
A similar design might be used to explore unstable environments such as collapsed buildings or rocky landscapes.
No, it won't.
I made a hexapod with 3DOF per leg that could walk in any direction "from scratch" by myself, in high school, for fun.
Adding some foot sensors is the obvious next step, and I've heard a lot about learning algorithms for walking robots being used over the years.
Honestly, I'm only bitter because I made something cooler in college but never bothered to post it online, so no one saw it aside from my classmates. But, it was a battery-powered 4 legged walking robot that ran a micro ITX windows XP pc inside its body, and was controlled through the internet with a remote PC by a wireless Xbox 360 controller.
It was honestly totally badass.
Oh, and it could support 20lbs static weight on its standard size hobby servo motors (but they were the $115 ones).
But more than anything, my point was is wasn't that hard, and that robot wasn't going to be walking through rubble any time soon.
It *could* have, but it wasn't going to. Neither is this one. People have been building basic hexapods for a long time. We still haven't sent one to the moon.
-Taylor
Re:Six legs not too hard (Score:4, Informative)
That link didn't show what stiquito could do. Here's a video [youtube.com].
"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 [hexapodrobot.com]. 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 [google.com]
UA Engineering's Press Release & Video (Score:1, Informative)
here's the link to UA Engineering's story w/ youTube video:
http://www.engineering.arizona.edu/news/story.php?id=86 [arizona.edu]
or, cnet: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10450394-1.html [cnet.com]
mod this into the ground as flamebait, but why in the hell would one want to read about scientific achievement in an article posted on a cable "news" station's web site (read: all of the cable "news" stations are pure crap), let alone the one that serves as a megaphone for those most hostile to scientific achievement. Let's see, do I want some cable "news" douche to dumb down the info so as to allow it to be presented to me in a more palatable fashion? hmmm, that's a tough one...
What? you say the article linked in TFS wasn't dumbed down? Well, I must inform you that this is /. , and as such I DIDN'T RTFA linked in TFS!
Re:Six legs not too hard (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Eh... (Score:2, Informative)
First: your story sounds like a lie.
Second: you didn't get the point, that piece of software involves computer vision and A.I. Creating a simple neural network for reading characters of moving images is something not even 1% of computer "geeks" can really do.
Re:Isn't this the MSR-H01 Hexapod (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This is news? (Score:1, Informative)
The exciting thing is that the robot could compensate when part of itself was damaged and get around/over obstacles</p></quote>
The whole point of a Genetic Algorithm is to learn what is the most effective way for it to move. If you remove a leg, it will just run through its simulations again and find a new way of moving.
Infact a topic very close to this was covered in January
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/01/30/1555237/Evolving-Robots-Learn-To-Prey-On-Each-Other
There they learn to hunt and run away from each other, the video is so much cooler.
Re:This is news? (Score:3, Informative)
That is correct. Mark Tilden has been doing similarly cool walking robots (but mostly in analog!) for years now. Check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM4DitOJdyA [youtube.com]
I remember seeing a video of one of Mark Tilden's robots (or maybe it was one of Rodney Brooks) and he was able to bend a leg back and it would keep walking successfully with the remaining legs. The beautiful part was that there was no microcontroller involved - it was simple analog circuits replicating neuron functions. The class of robotics Tilden founded is called "BEAM robotics" - more information can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics [wikipedia.org]
http://www.solarbotics.com/ [solarbotics.com]
Video Interview Shows Robot (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Video Interview Shows Robot (Score:2, Informative)