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Technology

CONRO Configurable 'Lego' Robot 30

Posted by michael from the speckled-band dept.
Trebor the Mad Overlord writes: "The CONRO project is an attempt to design robots that automatically build themselves out of small component modules and reconfigure themselves as needed. Sort of like Legos that build themselves. Interesting idea, just in the initial stages, but lots of cool videos on the site."
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CONRO Configurable "Lego" Robot More

CONRO Configurable "Lego" Robot

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  • oh just great (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Doesn't this bother anyone?

    ... but the system can reconfigure itself in order to grow a set of legs or other specialized appendages.

    Like, perhaps, machine guns? Spinning blade saws? Mutated anthrax spores? A buddy of mine on IRC always said that we'd always be safe from killer robots if noone ever welded a gun to one's arm...and here these people want to build one that can do it by themselves? Let's make the machines at least work for it, please.
  • Biotech = Controlling genes and DNA (ala Galactica).

    I think you mean Gattaca [imdb.com]. Note that the name only contains the letters G, A, T and C.
  • If you look closely at the design, it only needs the two motors for each unit.. when combined as an assembled unit, it has much more mobility.
  • Xerox PARC has been showing reconfigurable robot technology to visiting summer interns for years.

    Their project page is at: parc.xerox.com/spl/projects/modrobots/ [xerox.com]

    There are static images [xerox.com] from their demonstrations, including one at comdex '99.

  • Well, I work here and know the people so maybe I can explain it a bit.

    "Hormones" are just a metaphore used ing the distributed control algorithm. Since every block is a self contained computer/robot, all the robots need to be cooridnated. But the goal is to develop a scalable algorithm, so rather than assume centralized control where one robot instructs all other what to do (making a processing & feedback nightmare), they have electronic "hormones" that "bleed" from one robot to its neighbors. Each robot reacts to its inputs and hormone states to determine what it does. Kinda like individual cells working together in a multicellular organism.

    Anm
  • yes and the technical term for you is "luddie". If we were to develop a self replicating robot and somehow get some sort of intelligence into it, it would probably be about as intelligent as a fly. Less than a fly infact, but you obviously fear flies.
  • Borg nanobots are next!

    but jeri ryan can assimilate me any time!

  • This kind of thing as amazing potential for unmanned exploration of enviroments that humans can't go to (space, deep sea, arctic, volcanic, you get the idea) Imagine an explorer probe that could add additional 'air bags' if it detected it would land on harsher terrain -- and then, after landing, remove those airbags and replace them with sheilding to protect it from a dust storm. Or from solar radation. You can't put all those things on one probe because of limited space -- but a probe that could change its sheilds, or landing gear, or treads, or whathaveyou -- or hell, change its own damn batteries (Oh, for my son and daughter's toys to be able to do this!) -- this could make space exploration SO much easier and more reliable.

    Poor little no puppy toe!

  • This could have some really fantastic real life applications. The second prototype looks promising. I guess to really get this working (much like the Lego Mindstorms kit) you would need to have some sort of "brain" module that would serve as the master controller for all subsequent modules. The 2nd version having two motion axis realy makes a huge difference. If they were to add a rotational axis, just think of the future of automotive assembly lines, quickly re-tooling for different models of cars, on the fly. Then we could have just in time automotive plants like we do computer plants. The possibilities are endless!

    I hope they are using some language other than g codes to program these things... g codes (used in cnc lathes and mills are okay for that purpose, but a bad idea for a robot (IMHO).

    Do I see a future low bandwith comunications protocol, or will they set it up using tcp/ip so that with everything else it can be put online.

    How long then would it take someone to configure one of these as a webserver (but I digres...)

  • So more intelligent than you then...
  • Yeah, by the cool lego people themselves.
  • I don't think it's a question of intelligence or intent. Bacteria and viruses are considerably less intelligent then flies, and nobody disputes how dangerous they can be. We do have to be careful when we start bringing together these technologies.
  • And of huge sizes.. The total might take up more than a whole linux distro.

    Can someone point to movie files that are good so that we can view *the best* and also save the bandwidth..

    thanks.. .

    Sorry, I don't have time for this. I've got bugs to write.

  • The only problem is that you can never find enough of the little 2 dot red ones...

    (not an attempt at a FP here, just late at nite ramblings)
  • Those are power cables not control cables, those little battries are mondo expensive if you are running 20-30 modules for hours at a time.
  • The whole thing sounds wicked.. I want one made out of lego.. BUT.. it only has pitch & yaw motors.. you would have thought it would have been given a third so it could twist?
  • Plus, there some other folks working on the same sort of thing. They call them "Hyper-Redundant Robots". http://robby.caltech.edu/pictures.html [caltech.edu]
  • Bluetooth might be the best way to control these modules. It's going to be so widely used that chips will be ultracheap. There'd be no need then to have wiring between the modules, and it would make control from outside easy (at least for short ranges).
  • Wouldn't the robots have some trouble... I mean, even humans have enough trouble trying to get two bits of LEGO seperated sometimes. Sure, its not exactly LEGO but the pieces look like they could be abit tricky... I think they should also build a speaker into the robots so that they can scream obsenities at the pieces when they get frustrated. Maybe they could hum as they work, too?? Provided everything is going well, that is.
  • It was a robot that was meant to craw down pipes or something, but it could lose up to half of itself and still work, and it was like 20 different snakelike sections, and each section had a certain function. So whenever it needed a certain function, it would rearrange itself so that that function was at the top of itself.
  • I guess that guy who makes all those cool lego people is out of a job!
  • Something like this looks ideal for minitiaturization - thousands of copies of a single controllable element - who knows what you could make? You'd probably want to replace the batteries with a power storage system more easily controllable (and refillable) from outside; and all those control cables need to be somehow embedded into the interconnections between modules, rather than strung individually back to the controller. Hmm. An IP network architecture might make a lot of sense for control. Wired or wireless could work with something like this... Still, the concept of embedding everything you need in a single modular element is a great one - no need to sort parts!

  • Someone ported make to run on Legos...

  • sure.. I think it's called "Slashdot poster".
  • CONRO isn't quite there yet, but it's definitely a step in the right direction (with the goal of replacing inefficient human forms with superior robotic life, of course). :-)

    Self-replicating constructs are sometimes called von Neumann machines [lslwww.epfl.ch]. It's a pretty cool idea that the popular media invariably links to Terminator [imdb.com] (in the same way that all news stories about comic books must include Bam! Pow! or Holy [foo], Batman! in the title).

    Also, here's a link to legal issues [nanozine.com] about artificial self-replication in case anyone was worried.
  • I think the most important thing is whether they can tip themselves all over the floor for people to tread on in the dark.
  • Major challenges include packaging, power and cooling as well as the major issue of programming and program control.

    Now listen carefully, precious army of self constructing robots. Your first important mission will to assemble your own Peltier units.

  • Virtuosity (Score:3)

    by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Tuesday December 26, 2000 @04:07AM (#540376) Homepage Journal
    Woah! Ok.. I'll stop dissin' Xmas for killing Slashdot.. this has got to be one of the coolest items ever posted. These robots remind me of the great movie Virtuosity [imdb.com] (well, I thought it was great, but I loved Hudson Hawk, The Arrival and Mission Impossible). In Virtuosity Russel Crowe plays SID 6.7, a psychotic virtual reality program that escapes into the real world using a nanotech based material. We are first introduced to this material when one of the researchers at this government run facility plunges a program crystal into a tub of blue stuff which quickly forms into a snake. Each (macroscopic) element in the tub is identical but performs a different function directed by the program in the crystal. A great movie that I highly recommend.
  • When I first read the news bit, I thought, "Uh-oh! Someone's working on a self-replicating, AI-like robot." But upon further reading/perusing of the acutal site, they are building a robot that configure itself according a situation out of a finite amount of parts. That's cool. I can think of some scientific applications for this.

    Slightly Offtopic Rant Ahead: I'm sorry. Some of the new technologies scare me. Yes, they will be developed with good intentions, but someone, somewhere will develop a sinister way to use it. Nanotech, Biotech, and AI are the 3 coming technologies that scare me the most. They all sound cool in some of the scifi books, but if you look at recent human history, the ones in power have a tendancy to destory and kill things. Hence my worries about those 3 technologies. Nanotech = Controllable nanovirus. Biotech = Controlling genes and DNA (ala Galactica). AI = Computers taking over (ala Matrix). My fears aside...

    Amigori

    --------------
    Humans have a tendency to destroy things.

  • Software based on Hormones??? (Score:3)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Tuesday December 26, 2000 @07:17AM (#540378) Journal
    I saw this link [isi.edu] on that page labeled "Second CONRO prototype - SOFTWARE based on Hormones".

    This got my attention, so I checked it out. There are some movies on that page ranging from 6 megs up to over 60 megs. Definitely high bandwidth material. Not too much actual information though.

    Of course, there are many obvious jokes and speculations you could go with here. For example, the last thing we need is an army of robots that need their medications

    I did find some info elsewhere on the site.

    Here is the abstract from one of the PDFs you can download on the Project Information page [isi.edu]:

    Abstract.

    Self-reconfigurable, or metamorphic, robots can change their individual and collective shape and size to meet operational demands.

    Since these robots are constructed from a set of autonomous and connectable modules (or agents), control of the robots and coordination among the modules are highly complex and challenging tasks.

    The difficulties stem from the fact that all locomotion, perception, and decision making must be distributed among a network of modules.

    This network has a dynamic topology, and each individual module has only limited resources in terms of computational power and local information about the topology in its neighborhood.

    To meet these challenges, this paper presents a distributed control mechanism inspired by the concept of hormones in biological systems.

    We view hormones as broadcast messages that trigger different actions in different modules, and exploit such to coordinate motions and perform reconfiguration in the context of limited communications and dynamic network topologies.

    The paper develops a primitive theory of hormone-based control, and reports the experimental results of applying such a control mechanism to our CONRO metamorphic robots, along with the results of simulations.

    This almost deserves a front page story by itself!

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