Robot With Broken Leg Learns To Walk Again In Under 2 Minutes 69
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."
Great (Score:5, Funny)
Crowbars won't save you now.
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Another step to the T-800 Terminator (Score:2)
I can't wait until Skynet becomes self-aware.
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Sorry. Forgot the link: The Terminator movie ending [youtube.com]
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Does it matter? There was no Chuck Norris in the terminator "if there was it would have been short and boring", however these is a Chuck Norris out here in the real world.
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We're only two legs away from a robotic spider!
Just Testing Code (Score:5, Insightful)
The "new" walking patterns are all pre-programmed. It's not learning, it's just running a few presets and seeing which results in the greatest forward speed. This has use, but I wouldn't throw around "learning" for this experiment. If a novel break comes along that the programmers have not planned for, the machine won't have a working behavior is it's data banks.
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Kind of like us animals. After an injury we have limited options to choose from. Just seeing which "preset" works the best.
Re:Just Testing Code (Score:4, Insightful)
Well... It's leaning in the same sense that I did when I accidentally hit my thumb with a hammer and my grandfather said that I should try and not do that again - and that he had learned that solution himself in his younger days. Grandfathers are often helpful like that.
Re:Just Testing Code (Score:4, Insightful)
If a novel break comes along that the programmers have not planned for, the machine won't have a working behavior is it's data banks.
Just presenting an oversimplified argument, but how would that differ from what our DNA has programmed for us. When I see robots using code for whatever specific reason, what's really going through my mind are that these are just micro components of what will eventually be incorporated into a much larger more complex "organism" Think of robots these days as simple organisms, where the primary concerns are mostly locomotion and simple functionality.
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I learned some interesting new things in differential calculus this morning. That's an example of learning where the result is completely unanticipated. You won't find special cases for using calculus techniques in my DNA, that's all external.
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Neural Net... (Score:1)
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switch to run gait when needing to move fast over harsh terrain, switch to wheels when on smooth terrain (my bot designs are usually quadrupeds with wheels instead of feet, which is more stable and less damaging to the ground then hoove style feet) , switch to uphill gait, switch to downhill gait, switch to parallel to incline gait, switch to creep gait, switch to silent walking gait, switch to damaged gait, use legs as another manipulator, crawl, etc.
making bots that can function in any environment a huma
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Think of the uphill gait while damaged...in your scenario you'd pick either 'uphill' or 'damaged'....but with
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Yes; we have learned much from the Daleks.
Eventually these hexapods will realize that they are sometimes more efficient when flying. Watch out.
It is even faster when injured... (Score:5, Insightful)
So the forward speed with all legs functioning is 0.25m/s, and with one leg broken it is 0.27m/s.
Therefore, if a robot chases you, do NOT break its leg, because that only makes it chase you even faster!
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I picture breaking five legs and having it hop around on the sixth like a pogo stick.
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I picture breaking five legs and having it hop around on the sixth like a pogo stick.
It wouldn't even reply with "'Tis but a flesh wound...."
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Re:It is even faster when injured... (Score:5, Funny)
You clearly know nothing about extrapolation. The more legs you break, the faster it goes!
Obviously the solution is to break one of your own legs to level the playing field.
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So the forward speed with all legs functioning is 0.25m/s, and with one leg broken it is 0.27m/s.
Therefore, if a robot chases you, do NOT break its leg, because that only makes it chase you even faster!
It only gets worse once the scary violin music starts...
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You'll only make it angry. You wouldn't like it when it's angry.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Fast Forward (Score:5, Interesting)
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I do recall that episode and was going to write about it. It was late 80's. I will say that I don't recall it being 2 feet long and I don't recall it being connected to anything. But you are exactly correct about the test. they disabled it somehow, and over the course of 5 minutes it was walking again and running some sort of search pattern.
But now I don't recall if they disabled a leg or not.
This brings on a side point:
I do recall a study about repetitive science and lab work (also coding): their study sho
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It was one of the few untethered machines they had in the episode and I thought it amazing because it had no centralized intelligence. It had a core command set that told it to "walk". Or more according to them, gave it the desire to walk. How it did that was up to it.
They disabled it by flipping a switch on the back that shut it down. And it was stunning to watch it learn to stumble then
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a bit of research and I found
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/r... [cmu.edu]
used this search on google.... MIT robot ants walking
came up with this
http://webcache.googleusercont... [googleusercontent.com]
history repeating itself LOL
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Under two minutes of bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, I can make all kinds of tasks faster by precomputing much of the work and then looking it up in a table. Congratulations, you've (re)discovered another instance of a Space/Time tradeoff [wikipedia.org].
Now, in particular what they've done is still wicked cool -- it's a great idea to perform may millions of simulations ahead of time so that at runtime (heh) you can quickly draw on that data to adapt. It would be perfectly good research even without the over-the-top claim that they've somehow made the work faster as opposed to cleverly pre-computing much of it.
But that's research -- you do something neat and then you make a ridiculous overstatement to generate buzz ...
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Sarah Conner ... (Score:2)
Controlling Damaged Aircraft (Score:5, Informative)
I recall about a decade ago the Department of Defense or NASA working on this sort of adaptability for controlling damaged aircraft.
An aircraft that suddenly loses use of a part of a wing or a flight control surface may still have sufficient flight control capability to fly home. The problem generally is that the pilot's control inputs won't produce the same motion responses, and the pilot generally has only seconds to map the inputs to control outputs.
The idea was for the computer to do this mapping for the pilot, so the pilot would continue to apply the appropriate inputs (to roll the plane for example). The computer would determine which of the remaining flight surfaces to employ in order to best achieve the desired motion.
One example that I recall was when the aircraft rudder was lost, yaw motion was compensated by dropping the landing gear and speed brakes on only one side of the aircraft to cause more drag on only one side, yawing the aircraft.
Is this really a breakthrough? (Score:4, Insightful)
Against the Slashdot rules, I read TFA and watched the entire video.
Unless I'm mistaken, all they did was create a giant array of possible motor combinations for movement, and then the robot just randomly tries them until it finds one which lets it more-or-less go in the same direction. It may not be the best one, but one that mostly works (it just stops at the first one that mostly works).
Is that really a super big breakthrough? If the robot dynamically adapted to the broken leg, and figured out how to move using some semi-intelligent algorithm, I would say that is really awesome. But this is literally just trial and error through pre-created movement specs, randomly, then just selecting one that is mostly okay.
Not trying to downplay other's achievements or research or anything, but it just doesn't seem like a big break through, unless "brute force" is something novel.
the word breakthrough appears only in your comment (Score:1)
Very Slashdot of you to burn that strawman down so thoroughly. Not that you wanted to shit on the accomplishments of others, but it just feels so good...
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> Is that really a super big breakthrough?
Searching through look-up tables?
Nah, not really.
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Not that much intelligent adaptation (Score:2)
As far as I understood the article, everything is based on a behavioral repertoire... The only advancement of the study would be the confidence mapping of said repertoire? Wouldn't it be better to work toward the automatic creation of this repertoire by the robot itself?
As the Black Knight says... (Score:3)
When animals lose a limb, they learn to hobble remarkably quickly.
Right, I'll do you for that!
It's just a flesh wound.
How long to prevent it? (Score:4, Funny)
A.I. development (Score:1)