- Researchers built, with an AI-assist, a Lego-like robot that may someday lead to us having our own weird robot-building kits
- It had no head or eyes, but it intrepidly navigated uneven terrain
- Its ability to self-adjust to unexpected conditions may teach us something about how animals evolved
Its jerky movements are bizarre, and it looks like the love child of a spider and a K'NEX set, but Northwestern University's robot is actually something special in the world of robotics: AI essentially developed the design and movement strategy.
Researchers unveiled the AI Robot this month in a research study, "Agile legged locomotion in reconfigurable modular robots," published in PNAS. The study notes that most of today's robots are either bipedal or quadrupedal (obviously, there are also a considerable number of robots that operate on wheeled bases).
While these robots can walk, run, jump, and tumble, the Northwestern team contends they can't be modified "in situ," meaning that if the robots encounter an unexpected situation or even one that disables a limb, they can't adapt.
The goal here was to build a robot that might not only operate better in these environments, but that might also help them understand how animals evolved. Perhaps this work might offer some clues into why spiders have 8-legs, centipedes a hundred, and snakes no legs at all, and how each has adapted to navigate their environments.
Researchers started with self-contained autonomous legs that include a central processing unit, battery, and motor. It's a remarkably simple system featuring just one moving joint.
They then fed that design into their AI. From the paper, "feeding modular legs as building blocks to an automatic design algorithm enables the discovery of novel 'species' of agile legged robots."
Basically, the algorithm figured out how these seemingly independent systems could work together, move, and recover. This was quite a task considering there are, according to the paper, "hundreds of billions of possible ways to connect at least two and no more than five modules."
When the legs are snapped together, the researchers reported that some legs transformed into supporting pieces, working with other limbs to help them walk. When you watch the robot move, you see the lattice reconfiguring itself on the fly, assigning the tasks of locomotion to some segments and support to others.
Videos show a robot that looks more like play pieces, and that moves in jerky and unexpected ways. There's no vision system, so the sensors depend on reading orientation and mostly seem interested in forward locomotion at all costs. Elegant they are not.
When a couple of co-workers noticed the video on my laptop screen, they pointed and asked, "What is that thing?"
The 3D-printed, carbon fiber AI robots autonomously figure out how to navigate a rocky terrain, sand, and a couple of inches of water. At one point, a researcher beats one of the robots with a stick until a leg snaps off. The robot recovers and finds a new way to move.
Seeing the AI robot in action, it doesn't seem a stretch to call it a "novel species" of robot.
It's fun to watch the researcher push, throw, and torture test these intrepid AI bots, but the potential is far more serious. Researchers think these legs could eventually be mass-produced and that the "Lego-like" design might lead to everyone being able to create their own agile robots. Who knows what people could build?
"The resulting designs might recapitulate some of the locomotor structures and behaviors found in animals," write the researchers, "or they may reveal entirely new solutions for old terrestrial problems."
What would you build with a Lego-style robot kit? Let us know in the comments below.
