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Xerox PARC Working On Modular Robots 83

Posted by Hemos from the build-with-construtix dept.
An reader writes "I was watching Discovery Channel Canada last night, and they had a story about modular robotics that is being researched at Xerox PARC. Rather than build a single, large robot, project leader Mark Yim is working on small, autonomous bots that can work together to achieve a desired goal. When many of this bots are linked together, they call the result a polybot. "
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Xerox PARC Working On Modular Robots More

Xerox PARC Working On Modular Robots

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  • The Unix paradigm? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by larien ( 5608 )
    Isn't this similar to how Unix does things? Instead of monolithic applications (*cough* MS *cough*), we have a number of smaller apps that can be linked to do something else (i.e. awk, sed, grep, find etc).

    • Re:The Unix paradigm? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Osty ( 16825 )
      Isn't this similar to how Unix does things? Instead of monolithic applications (*cough* MS *cough*), we have a number of smaller apps that can be linked to do something else (i.e. awk, sed, grep, find etc).

      Although you may not realize it, Microsoft apps also tend to be many smaller pieces linked into a whole. Everything is a COM object. MSXML is an object that can parse XML, mshtml handles HTML. Word is a container for a bunch of COM objects (the word processor, the spell checker, the smart tags, etc), Excel is a container for a bunch of COM objects, IE is a container, and so on. Just because each one of these components is not a separate program does not mean that they cannot be reused or linked together.


      The standard UNIX "method" is to take all those "single-purpose" apps like awk, or sed, or grep, and glue them together with shell script, or perl script, or tcl script, or some other scripting language. The same method applies to Windows as well. You can access COM objects via WSH (using JScript, VBScript, PerlScript, or any other language that has an implementation of a COM interface that can plug into the Windows Scripting Host), and then you can glue those objects all together into a larger whole. What's more, though, is that you can utilize these objects within actual compiled code, as well. C, C++, VB, C#, any language with a CLR target, ASP/ASP+ (in C#, VBScript, JScript, PerlScript, ...) all can reuse thse objects, unlike in the UNIX model wherein a C app would have to fork to spawn a new process and exec something like grep or sed, make a system() call, or "borrow" code from those tools. And in the code-borrowing case, you're limited to the language that the code was written in (and close relatives, as you can use C code in C++ and ObjC for instance).


      Obviously, projects like KDE's KOM/KParts architectures borrow heavily from this idea, and succeed well. But these projects have much farther to go before they'll reach the level of binary reuse and interoperability that Windows has had for years. And yes, I know about CORBA, but compared to COM or KOM/KParts, or even Mozilla's XPCOM, it's cludgy, bloated, and nasty, and is a much heavier paradigm (for instance, it requires an object broker).

      • Yeah, MS stuff works like this, but you can't find out about it unless you're a MCSD, have access to TechNet, or buy several $50 books. On a Unix box you can type 'man sed' and 'man ksh' and get all the info you need to write solutions.

        I'm not the kind of OSS radical that says MS should open its source code, but it definitely should ship documentation of these tools with its OSes.

        • Or, you could simply go to MSDN [microsoft.com] and get all that documentation for free. Sure, you have to know that it's there before you can use it, but once you've learned about it, it doesn't cost a thing.

  • PARC and robots (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by amphiskios ( 520478 )
    I believe experiments that have been conducted allowing robots to be generated in an artificial environment and then automatically assembled favored those that formed symbiotic relationships.

    And besides, the idea will just be stolen from PARC. It's a shame.
  • Now this is the kind of creative thinking that will really revolutionize robotics. Intelligent pieces that can assemble themselves into colonies that are greater than the sum of their parts. I would especially like to see this approach used in nanotech (but only if Asimov's Laws of Robotics are indelibly burned into the molecules).
  • doesn't anybody remember the constructicon devastator [unicron.com]... the first polybot

  • Sounds a lot like those transformer toys where you assemble many small robots to get one big robot. It would be funny to have those small bots assemble to make car or trucks, or aircrafts.

    Will Bandai or another of the compagnies that built those toys sue those guys? I suppose someone has already patented the idea of Robot changing into transportation mean.


  • The polypod looks more like a rainworm to me. Ah yeah, seperate pieces can self-assemble into a larger worm.
    Now add a replication device, so the worm can actually grow itself...
    (Oh no, it's taken over southern California!)

  • cool idea, similar to nanobots conceptualizations (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hackman ( 18896 ) <bretthall@ieee . o rg> on Friday September 14, 2001 @04:28AM (#2297516) Homepage

    This project has been going on for some time now, it's been well publicized in the robotics community and is certainly an interesting offshoot of robotics. I saw a presentation at ICRA (International Conference for Robotics and Automation) last year. Very cool.

    It strikes me as rather similar in approach to some of the nano-bot discussions I've read. I.e. build an "assembler" and use that to build other small pieces that can fit together modularly to do what you want. (that's kind of rough, but you get the idea) Interesting parallel in totally different research worlds, although modularity is hardly novel..

    The approach does have it's challenges however, the number of independent modules arguably makes the complexity much higher per resultant functionality. A simpler robot could have achieved some of those configurations, and probably more efficiently (power,weight,computational, etc..). Similarly, most robots are rather specifically designed with some task in mind, making general purpose robots is an astoundingly difficult task because of the widely varying requirements of the physical world between different tasks.

    I don't mean to bash, actually - I fully support this avenue of research and it's darn cool! Wish I had one..



    Brett
    UCSD Computer Vision and Robotics Lab Grad Student
    Here's the CVRR web page [ucsd.edu] if you're link-happy (no goats).
    • Thanks for the kind words ! As you say, we have many challanges (I'm one of the researchers on the project - though speaking unofficially etc, etc).

      Purpose built robots (99% of robots out there) are cheaper and do the job they are designed for better...but you need a different robot for each specialised task. If you can buy just one robot and have it do *everything*, then that's a different story.

  • More correctly called swarm robotics (Score:5, Informative)

    by DoubleTake ( 257889 ) on Friday September 14, 2001 @04:48AM (#2297547)

    This research project is repackaged swarm robotics. Swarm robots have been around for years. The main problem with swarms is getting the power and leverage to manipulate large objects as the swarm is only as strong as it's weakest link. The main benefit is that they tend to be more fault tolerant than monolithic robots.

    See:
    Robotics portal [umass.edu]
    Swarm robotics google search [google.com]
    CMU Robotics Institute [cmu.edu]

    • This concept of modular robots and the word "Swarm" sounds so much like the Replicators on Stargate SG-1. We better hope they don't develop self-replication and a hive mind.

      http://www.scifiguide.net/stargate/s4/401.html [scifiguide.net]
      Stargate SG-1 Episode "Small Victories" where they meet the Replicators, an evil group of robots that destroy entire worlds and civilizations, eating the raw materials to replicate, while absorbing the technology and using the shells of the conquered ships to find more civilizations and more advanced technology to absorb. Kind of like the Borg, but even more sinister in that they cannot be corrupted or reasoned with.

      You can watch a DivX of the episode at SG1Archive http://www.sg1archive.com [sg1archive.com] between season three final episode and season four 1st episode.

      • The main problem with swarms is getting the power and leverage to manipulate large objects as the swarm is only as strong as it's weakest link.

      I am not sure why this should be the case (if I understand what you are saying correctly). If the elements of the construction, say N robot units, are connected in parallel, then the "strength" of the construction can increase to up to N times the "strength" of a single element. Obviously that is not easy to do, but it should definitely be doable.

      • The main problem with swarms is getting the power and leverage to manipulate large objects as the swarm is only as strong as it's weakest link.

        Remember the bionic man? Two bionic legs and a bionic arm?

        If there's no bionic spine, the first time he would lift a truck, there'd be a sickening crunch in the middle. That's what we mean by the weakest link limiting the strength.

        • Remember the bionic man? Two bionic legs and a bionic arm? If there's no bionic spine, the first time he would lift a truck, there'd be a sickening crunch in the middle. That's what we mean by the weakest link limiting the strength. I don't think your example really relates. If each bot is working as a member of a hive, it can't bring down the others, can it? If 10 ants can lift a grape, then surely adding an 11th which is much weaker than the rest wouldn't hurt anything.
        • Your example does not describe a parallel connection of units, but a serial one instead.

          A simple example of parallel operation would be using your arms. Assume that your spine and legs are sufficiently strong and the weak link in your body is your arm. You can lift much greater weight using your two arms together than when using one arm only. That beats the "weakest link" limit.
        • Reminds me of the scene in "The Fly" with Jeff Goldblum, where BrundleFly arm-wrestled the guy and broke his arm. I don't think Radius and Ulna are the weakest link in the arm.
    • Rodney Brooks published a similar idea: Fast Cheap, and Out of control [mit.edu] in 1989. (This is different than the movie [imdb.com].)

      I particularly like a related, albeit less useful, plan of sending two robots to the moon, each covered in logos of various large companies. The plan was to finance the trip by selling the pictures the robots would take of each other.
    • Related, yes. But not really the same - a different philosophy. (I'm on the project - though not speaking officially, etc, etc).

      Swarm robots are many small independant robots which can work in groups (usually using some kind of behavoural control) to carry out a job. Also I think every swarm robot I recall seeing has been wheeled (though this is a matter of implementation, not a theoretical constraint).

      A modular self re-configurable robot is one robot that is assembled out of many small pieces that lock together in some fashion. The control may be distributed, but is likely to be coordinated
      and deterministic (rather than emergent behaviour).

      Compare a swarm of ants vs the liquid-metal man in _Terminator II_.

      Both have common advatages though: robustness (if one fails, then there are many more to replace it); versatility (it's not a fixed monolithic machine); and cheapness (completely composed of many small identical parts, hopefully cheap due to ecconomies of scale).

    • When I was a kid we called these things Constructicons and when the merged together they were then called Devistator.

  • Uhhh... Lego Mindstorms? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by shut_up_man ( 450725 ) on Friday September 14, 2001 @05:00AM (#2297568) Homepage
    Maybe Mark could talk to Lego to build additional, improved kits for their Lego Mindstorms [legomindstorms.com] line. His depth of knowledge in modular robotics might drive their products towards being less of toys, and more a general-purpose toolkit for robot construction.


    Plus, based on their recent comments on IP [slashdot.org], they seem like a pretty cool company.


    shut up man

  • In one of Asimov's books about robots. Admittedly this was a client/server type robot, rather than a peer to peer one.

    However, unless someone can prove otherwise, it looks like the original idea was Asimov's.

  • Grey slime (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pubjames ( 468013 )

    Remember that Bill Joy article speculating that humanity would be destoryed by a grey-slime of nanobots? Well, this is the type of work that's going to make them - imagine zillions of these things at nano-scale, each with it's own 'soft' (i.e using natural principals rather than heuristics) artificial intelligence all working together to provide a giant hive mind.

    Asimov's laws of robotics seem ridiculous in this context.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Robot Football (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Saggi ( 462624 ) on Friday September 14, 2001 @06:06AM (#2297672) Homepage
    Robot football could be a good inspirational line of thinking for research in polybots. We have several competitions going into robot football. These games will probably contribute to the system design of polybots. The idea here is to have many (more or less) identical robots, who by working together can reach some sort of goal.

    One of the things that have come from robot football events is that the individual robots need some sort of collaborative software to coordinate their efforts. So a polybot would proably benefit from a singe strong computer brain, distributing commands to the individual robots. Other approaches (manly in the nanobot research) move towards a simple set of rules that combined provides the desired effect.

    Robot football can easily be found through the search engines, but here are some links:

    Competition:

    http://www.tech.plym.ac.uk/robofoot/

    http://www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/projects/robotfootb al l/main.php

    Some research:

    http://www.cci.cse.dmu.ac.uk/cci/Projects/footba ll .html
  • How long before one of these guys gets entered for Robot Wars/Battle Bots? I believe those shows use evolutionary principles...
    • How long before one of these guys gets entered for Robot Wars/Battle Bots? I believe those shows use evolutionary principles...

      I dounbt it. individually, these bots don't do much. It's how they work together that makes them functional. and I don't think they have a Tag-Team event yet on BattleBots.

      Not to mention that on the Evolutionary scale, these guys are quote a bit more like Insects than the Mammals on BattleBots. One-on-one, they're far inferior. As a whole, they'll outlive anything with fewer than six legs.

  • Polybot/Polypod isn't new OR unique (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    These guys have been around for years, as have similar groups, one of which I spent the last three years working with. USC had a really sweet robot for size and power, but Xerox was up to 15 amps per face last I recall. That is NEVER going to be autonomous, at least not for more than a millisecond or two. For more modular, self-reconfigurable robots, check out I-Cubes [cmu.edu](my former job). There are lots of pretty pictures and links to a bunch of other groups, like CONRO at USC and Fractum from Japan.
    • I tried to look at some of the aniamtions. What kind of ActiveX files are they? I could not view the material, but it kind of looked interesting.
    • Not quite true I'm afraid. I'm one of the researchers on the project (though speaking unofficially etc etc).

      We have several different prototypes being developed concurrently - including the 15A jobby (which as you rightly point out, drains most batteries fairly fast :-).

      But some of them are fully self-contained (completely tetherless) and can travel about 1 Mile on the flat or up several flights of stairs
      on one charge.
  • One of the main focal points of Society of Mind, by Marvin Minsky was that the human mind was composed of thousands of functions like sleep, anger, hunger, etc. Reading that the robots are built out of moduals, does that mean they might be intelligent in some way ?
  • The pioneer when it comes to small, unintelligent, autonomous bots without a microprocessor must be Mark Tilden.
    His creations are so cool, with the Spyder as the crown jewel. He has also applied for a few patents when it comes to his neuro-net technology, with components called BiCore and MultiCore, among others.

    See www.solarbotics.com [solarbotics.com] for information, pictures and more!
  • it's called a polygone
  • Optimus Prime, get Polybot on our side and we can purge the world of that nasty Megatron forever!
  • Has Apple and m$ ripped them off yet? :-)
  • Last I heard, the big X was looking to sell off Pala Alto Research to avoid going bankrupt (this was right about when I quit working for Xerox), I've not heard anything about their financial status since...Does anyone know if PARC is still in danger of being sold?

  • Bots in Socks... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Squirrel Killer ( 23450 ) on Friday September 14, 2001 @08:54AM (#2298139)
    "When many of this bots are linked together, they call the result a polybot."
    With apologies to Dr. Seuss...

    What do you know about polybots? Well...

    When polybots fight,
    it's called a polybottle battle.

    And when they battle in a puddle,
    it's a polybottle puddle battle.

    AND when polybottles battle with paddles in a puddle,
    they call it a polybottle puddle paddle battle.

    AND...

    When polybots battle polybots in a puddle paddle battle
    and the polybot battle puddle is a puddle in a bottle...
    ...they call this a polybottle bottle puddle paddle battle muddle.

    AND...

    When polybottles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles
    and the bottle's on a poodle and the poodle's eating noodles...
    ...they call this a muddle puddle poly poodle bottle noodle
    bottle paddle battle.

  • I don't believe this stuff will be stolen from PARC nor that other technologies were necessarily stolen. PARC has a history of developing huge numbers of innovations and selecting those that will actually support the strategic direction of Xerox for production. The rest are sort of gifts to the rest of us.

    This technology however shows that Xerox continually innovates through PARC. The thoughts racing through my mind regarding the use for reconfigurable and self-repairing robots that can act in conjunction with others are astounding! Talk about adaptability....
  • here's a link to more info about the robots, from March 10th, of 2000 At TechTV [techtv.com]

    -motardo

  • We've seen this done before... it was originally a collection of robot lions that link together to form Voltron [voltronforce.com], Defender of the Universe!!!

  • Anyone seen these guys? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jgaynor ( 205453 ) <jon@gaAUDENynor.org minus poet> on Friday September 14, 2001 @10:53AM (#2298631) Homepage
    I found these guys [demon.co.uk] searching for modular robots a few months ago. The ideas behind their stuff are very similar if on a larger scale. The videos seem fake though. Anyone know anything more about them or have any insight into thier validity?
  • Has anyone looked at the dates on the bottoms of the pages? Feb 29 2000, Apr 19 2000, etc. Shows a little something about how quickly this type of thing hits the "normal" media. I'd also like to see an update on this. Where is it today? Where is G3 that was expected to be completed by the end of 2000? Has it been implemented or is it now dead? What would be real news is an implementation, not theory. Modular robots have been covered on Slashdot [slashdot.org] before. I want to see reality, not theory.

    • Yes, sorry about the out-of-date pages (I'm on the project - though speaking unofficially etc). No one has ever been specifically assigned the job of maintaining them - and it's not a job anyone really wants !

      The work has in fact been covered in "normal media" for some time (ABC world news last year, and plenty before that too). But yes, they can be very slow in picking things up at times (though slow is better than when they're inaccurate !).

      The above stated schedule for G3 has slipped a bit. Partly the nature of research, and partly due to the other parts of the project running concurrently. The last of the mechanical pieces we've had fabricated are arriving pretty much as we speak. So work is continuing (and no, I'm not silly enough to commit to a new date :-).

      >What would be real news is an implementation

      We have not just one, but several implementations (G3 is yet another). So it certainly is not "just theory". But that being said, you aren't going to find a modular self-reconfiguring robot in the "domestic cleaning" aisle of Safeways for some time yet !

      • Thank you! If I was a moderator, you would get all my mod points! ;)

        It just bothers me when there is a cool story posted or on the news and you never hear anything else about it. That is what I like about the slashbacks, I just wish we could have more of those types of things in the "normal" media.

        I fully understand the predicament of not wanting to take on updating the pages. Been there. Hated it. Documentation is the greatest necessary evil.

        Oh, need any help on the project? ;)

  • it's VOLTRON!
  • It would be wonderful if we had some polybots to aid with the search and rescue effort going on at the wtc RIGHT NOW. It seems like we should be able to design small, tenacious bots that could go into the hostile, challenging terrain of the wreckage and find people below the surface. Each bot could sport one or more cameras and be driven remotely by rescue teams on the surface. Perhaps they could use gps and/or each other's relative location to pinpoint the location of folks they find in three dimensions.
    • This is in fact one of the medium-term goals stated in our research contract (I'm on of the people on this project - though speaking unofficially etc). But nothing practical "right now" I'm sorry to say - we all wish we did.
  • PARC had a [xerox.com]
    Forum about a month ago on this topic.

    They gave some high school kids a bunch of these modules, and some lectures, and access to PARC people to bother with questions. The students came up with some pretty incredible stuff.


    I don't have any urls for their work, but here is the PARC Forum announcement:



    WIGGLEBOT, STRIKER, ARTBOT, ROAMER, AND NOX:
    TEENAGE ADVENTURES IN MODULAR ROBOTICS


    Apprentices from the Institute for Educational Advancement


    Xerox PARC Forum

    Thursday, August 09, 2001

    4:00-5:00PM

    George Pake Auditorium, Xerox PARC


    Abstract:


    This summer PARC participated in a project involving 10 exceptional high
    school students from around the country, a few computers, a few PARC
    scientists, and some advanced robotic modules. The program, one of several
    sponsored by the Institute for Educational Advancement
    (www.educationaladvancement.org), is based on an apprenticeship model for
    learning, with mentors and hosts drawn from corporations, universities, fine
    arts workshops, and other institutions.


    In our two-week-long program, the students learned enough Java programming,
    machining, and mechanical engineering skills to design and build 5 different
    autonomous robots each made of up to 10 individually controlled "polybot"
    modules. On the way, we lectured them, put them into discussion groups with
    school administrators, took field trips to local robotics research labs, and
    had them present their work alongside Ph.D candidate research projects.
    There were many late night work sessions, and the robot designs that emerged
    were surprising and exceptionally creative. It was all great fun for both
    the students and the mentors.


    At the forum, some of the students will return to present the results of
    their work and their thoughts. We will also present, after brief (4 days)
    reflection, some thoughts on the program and some thoughts on the
    structuring of educational experiences of this kind.



    Speakers:


    Apprentices and Mentors from the Institute for Educational Advancement
    (www.educationaladvancement.org)

    • Hello, hello...I'm one of the high school students who participated in this little forum. I created Nox with another student - it was a fairly simple nine-module robot with an IR sensor on each leg that had equal impetus to move away from light and toward darkness...anyway, point, point.

      This area of development was very interesting indeed when seen from the inside; fallibility of the modules, and the necessity of primarily-software solutions, were issues, but the former at least is conceivably solvable by programming a highly complex robot to actually replace its modules. Ideally, the code for these robots would be as generalized and polymorphic as their forms...when that happens, we could see something very interesting indeed.
  • Xerox will just develop it to the point were it works, then abondon it for someone else to use and make money off of.

    The mouse...Graphical User Interface...any of these ring a bell?

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