Tropes

spectrum.ieee.org 2015 00495.txt.txt

#Damage Recovery Algorithm Could Make All Robots Unstoppable For the last three years, wee been watching as the hexapods created by Antoine Cully and Jean-Baptiste Mouret have been getting increasingly difficult to put out of action. Using an exceptionally clever algorithm, the robots have demonstrated that they can shrug off absurd amounts of damage, adapting within minutes to recover their mobility even if you chop a third of their legs off. Today, this research has made the cover of Nature, which is a Very Big Deal (at least if youe a scholar), and it brings along with it some updates and even more potential for the future. Wee covered a lot of the theory and practice behind this research over the last several years Nature being chronically and woefully behind the times relative to IEEE Spectrum. Now the researchers report that their findings can be applied not only to legged robots but also to a new form factor: a planar robotic arm. This illustrates how it possible to endow just about any robot with resiliency via this algorithm, as long as it got enough degrees of freedom to enable adaptive movement. What unique about this approach isn just its versatility, but also its speed of execution. Consider an hexapod equipped with such adaptive skills. If youe a jerk and step on one of the robot legs, snapping it off, it going to impact how quickly and efficiently the robot moves. At this point, the robot is like, h oh, something bad happened, I can walk anymore. But instead of having to figure out which leg is broken and how or doing any sort of self-analysis at all, the robot simply starts trying a whole bunch of different gait behaviors through ntelligent trial and error, converging on something that works by exploring an enormous pregenerated set of potentially effective motions in about two minutes. From the press release: Recovering from damage is just one application for this algorithm: it can also be used to adapt to different terrain, or to develop new behaviors for unforeseen situations. Since all of this happens autonomously, and the robot can learn new behaviors as often as is necessary, it would be ideal for (say) planetary exploration, where no matter what happens, the robot is going to have to just find some way of continuing to operate as best as it can without any direct human assistance. And really, thinking about this stuff in terms of something as extreme as planetary exploration is wildly optimistic, because robots break all the time here On earth, and if they could just deal with it themselves (up to a point, anyway), we all be a lot happier. As part of the Nature release, the researchers put together some additional information, including anecdotes about a few things that surprised them as they were working on their project, which are definitely worth reading: Fun anecdotes should be mandatory for all publications. While it hard to top getting your research paper on the cover of Nature, this project is certainly not over: at the very least, we know that they have funding through 2016, and that in addition to hexapods and arms, theye also working with wheeled robots, and looking towards implementing this technique on whatever else they can get their hands On it should work on just about any robotic system, but specifically, theye aiming for obots for disaster-response operations like those of the DARPA Robotics Challenge. ounds awesome! Can you get it up and running by next Thursday? Wee pretty sure that those robots are going to need it. Nature h

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