Robot With Broken Leg Learns To Walk Again In Under 2 Minutes

KentuckyFC (1144503) writes When animals lose a limb, they learn to hobble remarkably quickly. And yet when robots damage a leg, they become completely incapacitated. That now looks set to the change thanks to a group of robotics engineers who have worked out how to dramatically accelerate the process of learning to walk again when a limb has become damaged. They've tested it on a hexapod robot which finds an efficient new gait in under two minutes (with video), and often faster, when a leg becomes damaged. The problem for robots is that the parameter space of potential gaits is vast. For a robot with six legs and 18 motors, the task of finding an efficient new gait boils down to a search through 36-dimensional space. That's why it usually takes so long. The new approach gets around this by doing much of this calculation in advance, before the robot gets injured. The solutions are then ordered according to the amount of time each leg remains in contact with the ground. That reduces the dimension of the problem from 36 to 6 and so makes it much easier for the robot to search. When a leg becomes damaged, the robot selects new gaits from those that minimize contact with the ground for the damaged limb. It compares several and then chooses the fastest. Voila! The resulting gaits are often innovative, for example, with the robot moving by springing forward. The new approach even found a solution should all the legs become damaged. In that case, the robot flips onto its back and inches forward on its "shoulders."

Fast Forward

[retech]

There was a show in the 1980's from the CBC in Canada called "Fast Forward". Every week it focused on different tech innovations and where they'd go. One week they had learning robots. For the most part these were all simplistic things. But they had an "ant" that was about 2 feet long that was autonomous. The MIT crew that had created it realized that a centralized brain was just too big and power draining to build into the robot. So they had a system of sensors with rudimentary data and needs (leg=up, down, forward, backward, touching, not, moving or not, etc). If they shut it down it lost the memory of how to do anything it learned that day. They turned it on for the camera and it was a flailing ball of legs. Within 5 minutes it not only learned how to walk but circumvent objects, falls, danger. It still sticks out as amazing. Watching this video, I wonder what ever happened to that bot from nearly 30 yrs ago and wonder why does this spider seem to have actually gone back in time?