Ok – probably won’t win any beauty contests… or any type of contest at all in fact, but it is pretty cool in that it’s… made out of stuff that’s kindof just lying about.

Obviously in the future there will be an entire class of robots/virii… that are basically just software, or software and some motors… that basically just “take over” a machine… or move into it like a hermit crab moves into a shell. It’d have to be some sort of AI of course… but that’s not impossible, surely. Bit of trial-and-error, innit.

The idea that intelligence must be locked inside a single body is hopelessly anthropomorphic… this is about as likely to wind up being the rule as the likelihood of software being limited to certain machines. Sure it happens at the level of drivers etc, but there are layers abstracted on top of that that are entirely free to be moved from host to host, and in some instances, move by themselves.

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I’m must confess to being a bit disappointed by hexapods – I thought they were going to take over the world at one point – mainly because of the hexapod router from about 3 years back

– and there was a minor rash of impressive debuts etc… but since then, they seem to have devolved into… “things that participate in dance competitions”.

Sign of the times I guess – that 3 years should be enough to get me all impatient etc. I mean I didn’t invent the wheel until I was about 6.

I think it might be an environmental thing though – although hexapods have the same number of legs as insects, they’re kindof facimilies, rather than being adaptations to a specific environment… so “the floor” is better suited to wheels… “outdoors, walls, trees” etc while suited to autonomous sets of legs, tends to favour legs that are in configurations where they’re not constantly getting tangled up in things.

There was a biomimetic video about the way robot hexapod legs should work a while back – TED I think… Can’t find it now, obviously – I think it was this one.

And speaking of which, you can now get kits for turning real live cockroaches into robots (ish)

Which personally, I think is cruel and insane – like remote-control via temporary lobotomy, but what do I know.

You can actually buy the cockroaches themselves via the link above, and there is a limit of two sets per order because they’re having trouble keeping up with demand. I do have a grudging kind of awe for what they’ve managed to do here – but I can’t be dealing with being cruel to animals – even if they are deadly enemies. If I saw this happening, the only thing I’d be able to think about would be “Get that thing off it, and let it go”

Because to me, everything in the whole world is basically a little person. Even rocks and stones are little people. They deserve respect etc.

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?

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

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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…