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."
Timing of articles (Score:5, Funny)
So it looks like we only had to wait a few hours for AI to surpass the abilities of a drunken man. Can't wait until tomorrow morning.
Re:Timing of articles (Score:5, Funny)
Exactly. We can't wait. *pumps shotgun*
rapid fire guns work better on Replicators (Score:2)
rapid fire guns work better on Replicators
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Exactly. We can't wait. *pumps shotgun*
You're going to need a bigger gun.
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Haven't history taught you that violence begets violence?
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Yeah, but history also taught me that noone listens to history or really pays much attention to now for that matter.
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Haven't history taught you that violence begets violence?
North and South America serve as a shining beacon of disagreement with that claim.
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Trouble is, peace also begets you violence, with that difference that you aren't equipped to respond to it.
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Haven't history taught you that violence begets violence?
Hollywood taught me that shotguns work very well against robotic spider infestations.
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Doom taught me that plasma weapons are the best tools for the job.
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Your geeksense should tell you that EMP weapons are superior for fighting robotic opponents.
Besides, these are not robotic spiders. Spiders have six legs, these only have six. For now, these are robotic ants.
Let us hope they do not teach themselves how to accumulate armor and learn to fly, lest they become robotic beetles.
At any rate, we should prepare ourselves for the possibility they become robotic fleas by learning to leap.
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Uh huh. Tell us more. Like how to subscribe to your newsletter.
WTF - This was done 20 years ago!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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Waaaaay to completely ignore how cool this is
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You want to make your way in the CS field? Simple. Calculate rough time of amnesia (hell, 10 years is plenty, probably 10 months is plenty), go to the dusty archives, dig out something fun, and go for it. It's worked for many people, and it can work for you.
-- Ron Minnich
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Here's the abstract of the paper:
We describe an algorithm which allows a behavior-based robot to learn on the basis of positive and negative feedback when to activate its behaviors. In accordance with the philosophy of behavior-based robots, the algorithm is completely distributed: each of the behaviors independently tries to find out (i) whether it is relevant (ie. whether it is at all correlated to positive feedb
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Not true the AI has not surpassed the abilities of a drunken man as the drunk is doing it with considerably fewer legs, usually 2 to 4, 5 if they are lucky.
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This is kinda funny (Score:1)
given the AI article just a few stories down.
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YAY the world is coming to an end... Robots have taken over. this is the Best thing EVER!!!.
*Dink dink dinK, ... CLANG*
In the distant future... (Score:3, Funny)
The world is quite different ever since the robotic uprising...
There is no more unethical treatment of the elephants.
Well, there's no more elephants, so...
Ah, but still, it's good.
When will they learn to dance? (Score:5, Funny)
These six-legged robots can dance! Hexapod: Best of Dance 2009 [youtube.com]
Yeah, this in no way lessens the accomplishment of a robot actually learning to walk, but I figured it was half on-topic, half cool-as-hell so I'd post it :-)
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Yeah, this in no way lessens the accomplishment of a robot actually learning to walk, but I figured it was half on-topic, half cool-as-hell so I'd post it :-)
Yeah I was rather impressed with that myself and was curious to see what he was using for processing, sensors and etc... Apparently it was an Atom, maybe TFA said that but I'm not down with FOX links.
http://www.engineering.arizona.edu/news/story.php?id=114 [arizona.edu]
I would of been much more impressed if he would of done this with something akin to AVR and read about it on Society of Robots instead of FOX but that's neither here nor there...
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Six legs not too hard (Score:2)
Stumbling around on six legs isn't very hard. Almost any vaguely reasonable leg movement strategy will work. Look at "Stiquito" [stiquito.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.
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]
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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!
Isn't this the MSR-H01 Hexapod (Score:3, Interesting)
here's the student's video [youtube.com]
Here's video of the MSR-H01 Hexapod:
video 1 [youtube.com]
video 2, at 1:35 it does similar "body wave" movements [youtube.com]
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."
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But yeah, if all *you* want is a coffee pot, then don't bother giving it a brain.
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This is because they have digital communication with feedback, so the robot can actually sense its "muscles". The common hobby servos, even the ones advertised as "digital", only have one-way analog communication, so all the appendages are blind... no idea if it has run into something, and no idea how hard it's working. [*] Also, there's no way to adjust controller parameters in the servo, for example to make it soft for interaction.
But these serv
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.
The reason there's a press release (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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Who knows what the marketing department is really interested in besides making Intel look cool.
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Six legs good... (Score:5, Funny)
Four legs bad.
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Four legs bad.
And two legs?
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Snikt
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I believe it is a reference to Animal Farm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm [wikipedia.org] See the section on Animalism.
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I deserved the woosh then.
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I had to look it up too. ;)
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
Re:Eh... (Score:4, Insightful)
For such a long rant, you didn't seem to given any reason why it won't.
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For such a long rant, you didn't seem to given any reason why it won't.
Well, it was a rant...
But i dunno, it's just nothing *new*. This is no more likely to be the next moon rover than any of the other hexapods people have built. You can buy kits to build this kind of thing for ~$500, and I've been told that if you study it, the learning to walk algorithm is pretty simple.
I know a great source for something exactly like this that I saw 10 years ago, but unfortunately his site went down a few years ago. (tappotec.net)
And I did admit, I'm partially just jealous that these kinds
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I'm sure that wheeled robots were around for a long long time before one was sent to Mars or the Moon. So just existing for ages without being used doesn't mean much
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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.
This is news? (Score:2)
I distinctly remember reading an article in Discover magazine about six-legged "insectoid" bots that taught themselves to walk... nearly 15 years ago.
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The exciting thing is that the robot could compensate when part of itself was damaged and get around/over obstacles
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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
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Imagine a swarm of these things communicating via wireless or 3G, sending walking algorithms to each other while traversing difficult terrain.
I've built enough walking robots to not be too chilled by that vision. They'll just kinda poke along, really slowly, and then their batteries will die.
Awesome.
-Taylor
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Chilled? I was thinking more of S&R possibilities or exploration.
I knew that word was going to be the one to get a response. Chilled, titillated, interested, whatever word you want to use. I used chilled because a couple posts up someone quoted a line from the article saying that it might be "terrifying" to see the robot move.
But yeah, search and rescue, I know. Its just that while this hexapod is a particularly nice one, its still somewhat basic. Its unlikely to get farther than a robot with tank treads on it, because they just work really well. That's why the military
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Imagine a beowulf cluster of these things communicating via wireless or 3G, sending walking algorithms to each other while traversing difficult terrain.
You seem to have made an error in your comment. I took the liberty of fixing it.
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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 ro
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I agree with Verteiron. This is NOT news. MIT has been doing work in this field since I was in high school in the mid to late 80's.
When I graduated in 89, MIT Robotics Group had already created a six legged robot that could learn to walk through a distributed reward based algorithm. I believe the robot was called attila.
Then in the early 90's they produced a couple new "generations" of these robots that could follow objects, seek shelter under chairs based on the shade (shadow) provided by the chair or tabl
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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
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Or the video game Galapagos. That came out in, what, 1996?
(Yah, it wasn't a physical robot, but it was a virtual one, and it certainly learned to walk on its own given enough time.)
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I'm sure they didn't do it the way this one does though - not enough compute power back then. This thing only uses a webcam for feedback to learn walking. It does onboard optical flow processing using Intel's OpenCV library to determine if it's (initially random/uncoordinated) leg movements are moving it forward.
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
Eradicator (Score:2)
Just the first step on the way to the Eradicator Hexapod [wikia.com]. :)
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Hexapodia is the key insight.
Hexapawn logic (Score:1)
Slightly Impressive (Score:1)
FWIW, x2 (Score:2)
The robot, which is equipped with sensors on each foot, teaches itself to walk
FWIW, people have been doing this kind of thing in simulation for a long time.
Also FWIW, in science fiction movies I have trouble with my suspension of disbelief when armies use the kind of "walkers" you usually see. But one with six or more legs could probably work better than track-laying vehicles in extremely rough terrain.
Probably still not so hot in soft terrain, though.
Video Interview Shows Robot (Score:4, Informative)
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Whoops, it was actually bought by Intel. Pretty cool that my first informative mod comes from spreading misinformation...
You're well on your way to becoming an editor here. ;)
Half-Life Head Crab? (Score:2)
Am I the only one that thinks it looks kinda like a head crab?
Is It a Feature it is a Bug? (Score:2)
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Ba duh BUH!
And next week (Score:2)
It will teach itself how to grind gold in World of Warcraft.
Not that I want to be a spoil sport... (Score:2)
... but this exact same thing was a demonstration project at the University Open day ... in 1997
Here it comes... (Score:1)
simpsonsdidit (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehno85yI-sA [youtube.com]