robosapien
May 21st, 2004
today I learnt about Mark Tilden’s RoboSapien (and saw one in the flesh).
quite an impressive machine, especially for £80 (you can buy it from the gadgetshop if you’re willing to go near the shop). ok, so it’s not exactly the most intelligent of the bunch, but it’s responses are very human like, and Tilden’s unique interest is in cheap / easy feedback systems, and as a consequence has focussed on the actual embodiment of the robot, rather than sophisticated software for reasoning and cognition. RoboSapien uses the natural feedback available from the physical world to help determine it’s movements; I guess considering nature more ‘on it’s side’ than is the view in a traditional AI approach. Traditionally, AI systems always seem to be an uphill struggle against the uncertainty of the world, whereas this approach to a system which interacts directly with the nature seems a lot more sensible. Certainly a far cry from many other attempts, such as the £100 million behemoth Honda humanoid robot, which looks distinctly un-human-like in it’s movements and I believe spends most of it’s time reasoning and planning.
To compare, the robosapien runs on just 12kb of assembler code, with 2 chips for processing, it relies mostly on physics and nature to control it’s movements. easy.
One Response to “robosapien”
1mark
May 27th, 2004 @ 21:52
theres a really good review as well as a mods and hacks discussion forum here.
http://www.fullspeed.co.nz/robosapien
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