Over The Counter Culture

For a little while, I adored Robot Wars, a TV program in which chainsaw, articulated pickaxe, or plough- adorned robots fought gladiatorially under the able (or not so able) piloting of their constructors. It overstayed it’s welcome on British, unable to evolve it’s format to resist the incursion of The Simpsons and teen soaps into the only timeslot (~6pm) programmers could find it.

Anyhow, this video of an astoundingly advanced, oddly dog-like four-legged robot has been doing the rounds for over a fortnight. Watch it - it’ll make you realise just how far things have come. The actual mechanics of the thing don’t *look* that impressive from still shots, but just wait ’til you see how incredibly it recovers from a hard kick in the ‘ribs’ that send it toppling sideways as it’s walking along. Or how it scrapples over incredibly uneven surface in a forest, in the snow, over rubble, how it jumps two legged over ‘gaps’… a LOT like a dog.

The sensors and intelligence are the strength of this thing (instantly calculating the right foot placement when it’s toppling over sideways, to stop it falling over). That kind of AI has probably been the biggest hurdle in robot design, and it looks like we’re past it now. The next step will be improving robot design using interdisciplinary work to incorporate biomechanics (i.e. copying some of the incredible structures of animals, for example the fine hairs of gekkos that allow them to run up walls - there’s a fantastic TED talk about this by Robert Full) - and we could have some seriously incredible robots roaming the distant planets, our streets, or our workplaces (or the alleyways of Baghdad) before long. Thought provoking.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.