“I, Robot” at UVM
Steve sent me a link the other day to the page of a faculty member in Computer Science here at UVM. Josh Bongard is doing some pretty cool stuff, and posing some interesting questions:
Imagine a robot-making machine is sent to Mars, and settles on Meridiani Planum. The machine detects that the ground is littered with boulders between 10 centimeters and 1 meter high. Should the machine build a robot with wheels or legs? If the robot should be able to not only observe its surrounding, but also manipulate objects (like drilling into rocks), how many manipulators should it have? What should the manipulators look like? Determining what the most appropriate kind of robot is for a particular task is tricky.
He goes on to describe how he tries to answer some of those questions:
I implemented a system, called Artificial Ontogeny, that ‘grows’ a virtual egg into a fully formed virtual adult robot. The adult robot is then evaluated against the task. This approach then combines biological growth with biological evolution; an individual robot can learn and adapt to its virtual surroundings over its lifetime, while the robot population evolves over generations similar to how organisms grow and adapt to their surroundings, while species adapt over evolutionary time.
Kind of sets the imagination wandering, doesn’t it? Cool stuff, and right in our backyard!