Co-Evolving Robots At Brandeis

neck jones pointed out this site titled "Towards Fully Automated Design of Real Robots" at the Brandeis Dynamic & Evolutionary Machine Organization Lab which dropped my jaw. As neck says: "Whoah." Anyone who can summarize their work by beginning "Start with a set of simple bodies and set of random brains" and go on to describe automated, automatic fused depositon manufacturing already has my attention.

Automated whose-it what's?

This will be really cool till Linda Hamilton crushes it in a hydraulic press.

tcd004

Here's my Microsoft parody [lostbrain.com], where's yours?

Really Cool!

This kind of stuff is what really gets me excited. Imagine the potential of this stuff if we sent a small set of evolving robots to a distant planet. They could have a database containing information on how to build various types of robots, and also, for eventual use, information on how to create humans, using a digital copy of human DNA, or frozen fertilized eggs.

Imagine it... Robots being used to help us colonize other worlds. Is that not /cool/?
--
Matthew Walker
My DNA is Y2K compliant

Cool step in Robot evolution!

This work out of Brandeis is an implementation of the thought-experiment done by Valentino Braitenberg in chapter 5 his book Vehicles [amazon.com], which outlines experiments in evolution of simple robots. The main differences between the Brandeis work and Braitenberg's experiment are that the robots are being constructed to particular practical ends and most of them are simulated before they are built. Damn. Wow. Well done!

The Second Amendment Sisters [sas-aim.org]

Other related stuff of interest.

This type of work is definately interesting and has produced some good results. If you are interested, definately check out the references at the bottom of the page, they are some of the defining work in this area. For your convenience I've linked up a few here (for some reason they're not linked from the actual site):

Karl Sims stuff

His Original Paper [genarts.com]
Some cool pictures and more links [genarts.com]

That should get you started.


Hotnutz.com [hotnutz.com] - Funny

Try it yourself

The whole simulation of robots angle reminded me of this site: http://sodaplay.com/ [sodaplay.com].

It's a java applet where you can design some silly little robots in 2-D, and see how you can make 'em work. No neural networks, or real-world synthesis, but hey, it's cool!

U of D Spring Lecture Series

I'm a Univ of Delaware Mech Engineering grad student and we had a talk on this from a related researcher earlier this year. It has some cool potential in a lot of areas, but also some strong disadvantages.

Basically a modular robot is cool in that it can adapt to situtations, have redundacy in case a module fails, etc. Makes for a great exploration units.

The main problem with them is that they're a bitch to control. The processing demands rise with the square of the number of modules, so they get sluggish pretty darn fast. They also are more inefficient than a committed robot and can have problems with local weaknesses. Basically a bad configuration can easily overload one module and cause failure of the whole robot. Preventing that takes even more processor time to test possible configurations, creating a wicked cycle.

Okay, this one deservs a big WOW!

Besides the program's innate ability to recreate star constallations, I do have to say this is interesting. The whole concept may even lend proof to evolution in a very simplistic way. If we gave a brain to a peice of silly putty and let it run around, would it eventually be a lizard or a snake? If we put it in water, would it become a fish? It is even becoming appearent that thoughts and decisions could effect evolution, wouldn't you say? If we program the peice of silly putty in water that the faster it swam, the better, and it randomly changed parts of it's body, when it becomes faster, it locks a change until another change makes it faster... well, you could actually write a program to simulate evolution. Hmm.. just a muse I guess, but doesn't it make animals look simple?
-Effendi

Re:Really Cool!

Yeah, sending robots to a distant far-away planet with frozen fertilized eggs would be cool, but what if it worked? Would it really ensure the survival of our civilization? Or would these new humans be a totally different race because they had no cultural ties whatsoever to us? Would they just die from depression because they had no older human to care for them, teach them, etc.? And what is more important to us: the survival of our species or the survival of our civilation (art, literature, way of life, etc.). There is so much we don't know about ourselves that it would be silly and perhaps even cruel to send unborn members of our civilization on such a mission. I mean, if you were one of these babies, wouldn't you ask yourself, "Why did they send me? Didn't they want me back on Earth with them?" Just a few thoughts on the topic.

For Those who fear "The Matrix AI"

As we all know in the movie The Matrix, AI somehow came to destroy humanity. This is what many of us fear AI will become. I'de like to point out that we usuaily get out of technology what we put into it. If you are Micro$oft, you put crap into your os, you get crap out of your os. If we design AI as a weapon, I have NO DOUBT that AI will destroy us. So, I believe we should take great care to avoid creating destructive systems, but rather systems that are friendly. Construction systems like the NASAs robot snakes, automotive safety systems, explorers, harvesters, educational systems, and such.

AI devices need not be concerned with power or money of world dominance.

And I don't believe Microsoft is Evil,
if only they cared about their customers,
like that care about their stockholders.

$0.02 - Please overlook my spelling and gramatical errors... you get the idea i think.

Peace
L8r
Dolio [mailto]

Sounds Familiar?

"Start with a set of simple bodies and set of random brains"

That's a description of Slashdot, isn't it?

Regards, Ralph.