- Scientists built, with an AI assistant, a Lego-like robot that could one day lead to our own strange robot building kits
- It had neither head nor eyes, but it navigated undaunted in rough terrain
- Its ability to adapt itself to unexpected conditions can 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 kit, but Northwestern University’s robot is actually something special in the robotics world: AI essentially developed the design and movement strategy.
Researchers unveiled the AI Robot this month in a research study, “Agile leg locomotion in reconfigurable modular robots,” published in PNAS. The study notes that most of today’s robots are either bipedal or quadrupedal (of course, there are also a significant number of robots that operate on wheeled bases).
While these robots can walk, run, jump and tumble, the Northwestern team claims they cannot be changed “in situ,” meaning that if the robots encounter an unexpected situation or even one that disables a limb, they cannot adapt.
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The goal here was to build a robot that might not only function better in these environments, but could also help them understand how animals evolved. Perhaps this work can provide some clues as to why spiders have eight legs, centipedes have centipedes, and snakes have no legs at all, and how each has adapted to navigate their environment.
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Researchers started with self-contained autonomous legs that include a central processing unit, battery and motor. It is a remarkably simple system with only one moving link.
They then fed this design into their AI. From the paper, “advancing modular legs as building blocks for an automatic design algorithm enables the discovery of new ‘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 given that, according to the paper, there are “hundreds of billions of possible ways to connect at least two and no more than five modules.”
When the legs are strapped together, the researchers reported that some legs were turned into struts that worked with other limbs to help them walk. As you watch the robot move, you see the grid reconfigure itself on the fly, assigning motion tasks to some segments and support to others.
Videos show a robot that looks more like a toy, moving in jerky and unexpected ways. There is no vision system, so the sensors rely on reading orientation and seem mostly interested in forward motion at all costs. They are not elegant.
When a couple of coworkers noticed the video on my laptop screen, they pointed and asked, “What’s that?”
The 3D-printed, carbon fiber AI robots autonomously figure out how to navigate rocky terrain, sand and a few inches of water. At one point, a researcher hits one of the robots with a stick until a leg breaks off. The robot recovers and finds a new way to move.
Seeing the AI robot in action doesn’t seem like a stretch to call it a “new species” of robots.
It’s fun to watch the researcher push, throw and torture test these intrepid AI bots, but the potential is far more serious. Researchers believe these legs could eventually be mass-produced, and that the “Lego-like” design could lead to anyone creating their own agile robots. Who knows what people could build?
“The resulting designs may recapitulate some of the locomotor structures and behaviors found in animals,” the researchers write, “or they may reveal entirely new solutions to ancient terrestrial problems.”
What would you build with a Lego-style robot kit? Let us know in the comments below.
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