GENOMICON

(via make)

A convergence of my favourite solution looking for a problem, and the medium where sooner or later, everything worth reproducing, gets reproduced. Legoification is like a coming of age ritual.

Anyway here it is. I quite like this because it uses some sort of distance sensor rather than a giro… and if you can get a lego motor-sensor loop fast enough to keep an unbalanceable thing balanced, then you can probably use something similar on a reprap to get around having to to have ultra-high-tolerance engineering on every part. The machine can just sort of “feel its way”.

Or something. On that note, here’s another solution looking for a problem (another favourite of mine) a hexapod… doing what hexapods always do, which is pushups, then a spot of very slow walking… but this one’s different because it’s used genetic algorithms to teach itself to walk… and the good thing about that, is that you can use the same software on different hardware configurations.

And finally… I saw recently that the 2nd Life guy’s new thing is to create a… “a sentient artificial intelligence which only exists in a virtual world, capable of thinking and dreaming.”

LOL – no chance.

Ok – I’ll refine that… there’s no chance of telling the difference between the real thing and a simulacra…

… but a difference that makes no difference is not a difference* right?

–

* that’s a classical allusion – 10 points to any sci-fi fan who can tell me where it’s from.

(via)

So obviously it’s been a bit of a let-down… about a year ago, we saw this video

and thought the future was here already – these things would spread like little self-replicating monsters and do useful stuff and make pests of themselves and so on…

… but although videos of them have proliferated like crazy, they don’t seem to do much other than… well, pressups. And Yoga. Yoga and pressups – the ‘hello world’ moment in the life of a hexapod. But then what?

Anyway, this new one is pretty cool – in a pressupy, yogary sort of way

the legs are a lot more natural looking movementwise – and I still get that knifing chill of arachnophobia when the thing starts walking. Apparently there are 4 degrees of freedom rather than 3 or… like 2, or 1… or none at all. Something that just sortof stands there. There was one of those in The Tate recently. The Spider of the Tate. <--- click that link. Go on, I dare you.

But back to hexapods... we really need to figure out something for them to "do". And don’t say search and rescue.

…aaaannndddd… they’ve gone again.

1983:

A primordial hexapod variant not only capable of climbing into the back of a pickup truck, but also capable of lifting it up as well – a 3-1 strength/weight ratio, which is fairly impressive.

There’s a scanned PDF article about it here… on a site about old robots – most of which are little plastic toy things, but not this one. I’m not sure how smart it would be… I mean the computer I was programming around then had 32k memory. Total. RAM/ROM combined.

Still… spooky looking critter.

If anyone wants to laser-cut one, here are the various bits:

It uses 18 motors – and it looks like the up/down ones operate on a screw type thing which is A) strong and b) slow.

Here’s my prediction for the future. When a mechanical muscles are properly invented… ie: a lump of stuff that contracts when you pass a current through it… there will be a massive proliferation of… well, functionoids.

Speaking of Hexapods, check this walking house:

(from N55 : via gizmag via Dvice )

Like a hexagonal winnebago that goes at about 1/1000th the speed. Cool though. In a funny sort of way.

from botjunkie

and

Creepy…

… this is slightly creepy as well, though in a different way:

(from)

playing on a different set of fears I think. This is pretty cool actually…. although it still isn’t actually doing anything… useful, which was kindof the promise of the cnc router-hexapod, back in the day.

Almost back in Theo Jansen land, but not quite… a massive wooden hexapod that you play like a piano and which drills itself into the ground.

By Paulo Nenflidio via Make

He also did this

Which is a soundscape thing with little baby Theo Jansen machines and a spider going up the wall on a string.

It’s art man. No one can tell you what to do.

There comes a point of course where innovation becomes embalmed in plastic, and it’s time to move on.

Maybe.

I mean these are neat and all, and some of them are autonomous and some aren’t, and they’re as cheap as chips (about 20 packets of chips) etc – but there’s something about something being mass-produced at this level that tends to suggest that the cool kids have gone elsewhere.

There are some videos on the site showing how they walk – and they actually walk quite well, which is rare for these things – in fact I think the crab is a variant of a Theo Janssen machine. I think this type of mass-production though is a bit like what Forest Higgs may have been on about when was going on about having the wrong model for evolution.

So imagine that you were working on this secret project where you were making a robot that could walk (using a Theo Janssen mechanism) and avoided obstacles and headed towards light etc… and then you found that you could get them for $19.99 at your local toyshop and for $5 on the internet if you bought them in bulk.

50% the fun is doing it yourself of course, but the other 95% is doing something that no one’s done before.

Not that I want to be negative of course – if the Hexabug folk come across this… if you want to do something really cool, make something that can be hacked… or have things plugged into… so people can use your systems as a platform that they can then build their own stuff upon. The main thing that’s driving all this DIY robotics… is the DIY.

I heard this Ted talk recently where someone was (If I got this right) theorising about life on Mars (or at least Phobos or wherever) being recognisable in certain respects, because given certain environmental conditions certain patterns tend to recur… sharks, dolphins, jets etc… that sort of thing.

So being interested in memetics as well, I am kindof interested in Parallel Evolution… and get fixated on certain basic designs.

Is it me or are there are a lot of hexapods about? Someone’s really thrown some money at this one:

from botjunkie

Nasa apparently.

There are a couple more that I hadn’t seen before at this rather fabulous collection of photographs from The Big Picture.

I’m not sure what bit of parallelism is being… parallelified here. Technically these things are insects – although they’re a bit more like crabs… but I’m not sure they’re either… or if the design IS actually springing out of an adaptation from any specific set of environmental conditions. I think maybe they look like crabs or tanks or people because… well, that’s just a cool thing for them to look like.

At the bottom of it all I have a feeling that the fundamental robotic muscle component is wrong. Servos are a little too slow and a little too noisy. They’re good for what they’re good for, but they’re never going to be able to compete with proper cockroaches. A real cockroach is an unbelievable piece of engineering. A real spider? Brrr…

It’s like Dancing with the Stars cross with Robot Wars. Probably.

It’s 2008. The future sure is getting here slow… but it is getting here.

These hexapod robots remind me of a sci-fi short-story I read when I was a kid back in the 70s – the story itself being written in 1958 – Crabs on the Island by Anatoly Dneprov. Enjoy etc.