life inspired

Justin Werfel and his group "have developed small robots that behave much like termites. The insects build impressive, metres-high structures even though they can follow only simple rules and have no knowledge of an overall plan." Full news article @ BBC news

Labels: collective intelligence, robots, Swarms

"Forget what you see in movies. Most robots sit in a factory somewhere doing dull, repetitive work. Even if their software does dream of a more interesting job, their physical form remains fixed from the day they’re assembled to the moment they’re junked. But it doesn’t have to be that way, say pioneers of `evo devo robo`—evolutionary developmental robotics, which applies principles of natural selection and biological development to machine design." Full news article @ Smithsonian Magazine

Labels: evodevo, evolutionary robots, robots

"In the future, more robots will occupy that strange gray zone: doing not only jobs that humans can do but also jobs that require social grace. In the last decade, an interdisciplinary field of research called Human-Robot Interaction has arisen to study the factors that make robots work well with humans, and how humans view their robotic counterparts." Full article @ NYTimes.com

Labels: human-robot interaction, robots, social agents

"Information theory is a powerful tool to express principles to drive autonomous systems because it is domain invariant and allows for an intuitive interpretation. This paper studies the use of the predictive information (PI), also called excess entropy or effective measure complexity, of the sensorimotor process as a driving force to generate behavior. We study nonlinear and nonstationary systems and introduce the time-local predicting information (TiPI) which allows us to derive exact results together with explicit update rules for the parameters of the controller in the dynamical systems framework. In this way the information principle, formulated at the level of behavior, is translated to the dynamics of the synapses. We underpin our results with a number of case studies with high-dimensional robotic systems. We show the spontaneous cooperativity in a complex physical system with decentralized control. Moreover, a jointly controlled humanoid robot develops a high behavioral variety depending on its physics and the environment it is dynamically embedded into. The behavior can be decomposed into a succession of low-dimensional modes that increasingly explore the behavior space. This is a promising way to avoid the curse of dimensionality which hinders learning systems to scale well." Full article @ PLOS ONE: Information Driven Self-Organization of Complex Robotic Behaviors

Labels: information, robots

"In most animal species, vision is mediated by compound eyes, which offer lower resolution than vertebrate single-lens eyes, but significantly larger fields of view with negligible distortion and spherical aberration, as well as high temporal resolution in a tiny package. Compound eyes are ideally suited for fast panoramic motion perception. Engineering a miniature artificial compound eye is challenging because it requires accurate alignment of photoreceptive and optical components on a curved surface. Here, we describe a unique design method for biomimetic compound eyes featuring a panoramic, undistorted field of view in a very thin package." Full paper 2 PNAS

Labels: biomimetics, robots, vision

A lost essay by Wiener: "The year was 1949, and computers and robots were still largely the stuff of science fiction. Only a few farsighted thinkers imagined that they would one day become central to civilization, with consequences both liberating and potentially dire. [...] If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty. [...] We must be willing to deal in facts rather than in fashionable ideologies if we wish to get through this period unharmed. Not even the brightest picture of an age in which man is the master, and in which we all have an excess of mechanical services will make up for the pains of transition, if we are not both humane and intelligent." Full essay @ M.I.T. Scholar’s 1949 Essay on Machine Age Is Found - NYTimes.com

Labels: cybernetics, robots, Wiener

"Flies are among the most agile flying creatures on Earth. To mimic this aerial prowess in a similarly sized robot requires tiny, high-efficiency mechanical components that pose miniaturization challenges governed by force-scaling laws, suggesting unconventional solutions for propulsion, actuation, and manufacturing." Full article @ Science

Labels: bio-inspired computing, flying, insects, robots

Another build-up on Golem on a build-up of Sim's paper: "This crazy looking thing is a simulated robot, made up of two different kinds of muscles along with bones and soft tissue for structure. This robot wasn't designed, it was evolved over a thousand virtual generations to move as fast, as far, and as functionally as possible." Full news article @ IEEE Spectrum. See the research from Jeff Clune.

Labels: evolution, evolutionary robots, morphohology, robots

"Laurent Keller's passions go far beyond ants as he taps genomics, robots, and other approaches to answer evolutionary questions." Full profile @ Science. . See also the article:

 D.P. Mersch, A.Crespi, and L. Keller [2013]. "Tracking Individuals Shows Spatial Fidelity Is a Key Regulator of Ant Social Organization". Science 1234316.[DOI:10.1126/science.1234316]

Labels: ants, collective intelligence, robots

"Scientists in the US have built and tested robotic ants that they say behave just like a real ant colony. The robots do not resemble their insect counterparts; they are tiny cubes equipped with two watch motors to power the wheels that enable them to move. But their collective behaviour is remarkably ant-like." News @ BBC News

Labels: ants, bio-inspired computing, collective intelligence, computation, robots

"We develop a neuroanatomically-grounded model of salt klinotaxis, a form of chemotaxis in which changes in orientation are directed towards the source through gradual continual adjustments. We identify a minimal klinotaxis circuit by systematically searching the C. elegans connectome for pathways linking chemosensory neurons to neck motor neurons, and prune the resulting network based on both experimental considerations and several simplifying assumptions. We then use an evolutionary algorithm to find possible values for the unknown electrophsyiological parameters in the network such that the behavioral performance of the entire model is optimized to match that of the animal. Multiple runs of the evolutionary algorithm produce an ensemble of such models. We analyze in some detail the mechanisms by which one of the best evolved circuits operates and characterize the similarities and differences between this mechanism and other solutions in the ensemble." Full article @ PLOS Computational Biology

Labels: animal behavior, connectome, robots

Winged Robots Hint at the Origins of Flight - ScienceNOW

Labels: flying, robots

"Beetles packing cybernetic implants that control their brains make a cheaper and more useful micro-air-vehicle than a fully robotic one -- but due to the weight of the battery packs required, development has been slow. Now a DARPA-funded team at the University of Michigan thinks it's eliminated that problem. By attaching piezoelectric generators to each wing, the researchers can harvest the energy generated in flight and use it to juice the mind-control circuits. " Full article @ Engadget.com

Labels: bio-engineering, Cyborgs, robots

"On the quantitative trading forum, Nuclear Phynance, the consensus on the patterns seemed to be that they simply just emerged. They were the result of "a dynamical system that can enter oscillatory/unstable modes of behaviour," as one member put it. If so, what you see here really is just the afterscent of robot traders gliding through the green-on-black darkness of the financial system on their way from one real trade to another." Full article @ The Atlantic

Thanks Mike for the link!

Labels: artificial intelligence, dynamical systems, robots

"People need to be able to comfortably communicate with the robot so that it can react properly to their commands and carry out their wishes when assistance is needed." Full news piece @ Scientific American Gallery

Labels: robots, social agents

LEONARDO DA VINCI’S 15th-century vision of mechanical flight apparently never included fixed wings assisted by propellers or jet engines. His chief inspiration was birds, reflected in drawings of a flying machine fashioned to stay aloft by flapping its wings. More than 500 years later, WowWee, a robotics and entertainment products company, shares that vision. Next month, it plans to release a mass-produced, functional ornithopter, a device that flies in birdlike fashion — in this case, a radio-controlled toy that mechanically flaps its Mylar wings. Full Story @ New York Times

Labels: biomimetics, robots, toys

"Making robots that interact with people emotionally is the goal of a European project led by British scientists. Feelix Growing is a research project involving six countries, and 25 roboticists, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists:. Full Article @ BBC NEWS | Technology

Labels: emotion, robots

A tiny chemical "brain" which could one day act as a remote control for swarms of nano-machines has been invented. The molecular device - just two billionths of a metre across - was able to control eight of the microscopic machines simultaneously in a test. Full Story @
BBC NEWS|Science/Nature

Labels: nanobots, robots, Swarms

From Art:

BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog's legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight. Boston Dynamics: The Leader in Lifelike Human Simulation

Labels: robots

A six-inch robotic spy plane modeled after a bat would gather data from sights, sounds and smells in urban combat zones and transmit information back to a soldier in real time. Full story @Physorg

Labels: biomimetics, robots