I Am. When? - Robotics

Fight for Flight

nospam@example.com (Andrew Maxim) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:06:09 -0700

Voting is up for the method of flight our robot will be using and will remain open until Friday evening. For the record, Animalistic should technically be termed Ornithopter. Compared to the other methods listed, ornithopter is a word far less common in a person’s vocabulary and I did not want to accidentally skew the voting because people did not know what a choice was off the top of their head. Thus, I went with Animalistic, it seems suiting enough.

In other related news, my brain is abuzz with ideas for each of the methods of flight. Despite my desire to work on other things over the weekend (studying for my college exams), some part of my brain keeps interjecting ideas into the forefront. Not one to let my conscious brain be overruled by another section, I pushed the thoughts to the back of my mind and returned to studying. For all of thirty seconds. And then I began searching the Internet for information, parts and supplies that I would need to accomplish whichever method of flight wins the voting.

Despite my need to finish my Operations Management course, it seems I will be studying aerodynamics this week. Damn brain. Anyway, happy voting.

You Design It - Flight

nospam@example.com (Andrew Maxim) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:29:00 -0800

It would seem that we will be building us a flying robot. Of course there are several forms that flight could take in this context, so we will have to jump right back into another poll to figure out where we will go from here. Seeing as I have not managed to complete an antigravity device as of the time of this entry, I can think of five possible flight systems that our robot could use. One of these systems I will not be including in the upcoming poll, however, but I will explain more on that below.

Fixed Wing - your a-typical airplane style of flight. Forward propulsion is provided through propeller or jet engine structure, with lift coming from wing design (airflow over/under the wings pulls the object into the air; the forward momentum provides this airflow). This is the method of flight that I will not undertake, as high speeds are generally required to provide the robot a means of getting off the ground, which would require sensory devices that are out of the price range for any hobbyist (remember, the finished design should be relatively easy for a hobbyist to duplicate). This style of flight also has limited applications that fall into surveillance and weapon delivery, neither of which really pertain to a hobby level robot (there are better ways to annoy cats).

Rotor - think "helicopter" and you have the basic concept of rotor produced flight. Fast spinning blades provide downward airflow and thus lift for the vehicle. Steering can be accomplished a variety of differing ways from tilting the primary rotor, to using additional rotors, to modified flaps. A robot utilizing rotor-produced flight has the potential for a good development platform.

Hover - floating on a cushion of air would be the best description for this method of flight. While in the strictest sense, hovering might not qualify as a method of flight, for our purposes it will do as the physical robot is not in contact with the ground below. A hovering robot could make an excellent development platform.

Hot Air - No, not your boss. Using lighter than air gases or heated air (heat rises) in a "balloon" provide the lift, while directionality is produced through propeller and flap combinations. Great for taking sensor readings as a result of the general slow movement, but limited task capabilities.

Animalistic - a.k.a. Icarus flapping his wings. Wing design combined with the upward and downward folding (most creatures' wings fold on the down stroke) motion provides both lift and directionality for this style of robot. Weight becomes very critical in this undertaking, thus limiting the robot to specific tasks as opposed to a development platform, but it would be interesting.

Those are the choices that come to mind for methods of robotic flight. If there is a method not listed that you think should be there, please post a comment. Otherwise, voting will open up Monday, March 10, 2008. Have an uplifting weekend.

You Design It - Locomotion

nospam@example.com (Andrew Maxim) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 12:15:00 -0800

When it comes to designing a robot you can just jump right in and start building or you can figure out what it is you want to accomplish with said robot and design from there. The second method is generally preferable, although building for the sake of building sometimes can lead to new discoveries. For the You Design It project we pretty much have to go the route of figuring out what it is we want to accomplish first.

Rather than presenting a million different possibilities on what our completed robot will do, we will start with the method of locomotion, which should help us narrow down our possible purposes. For the sake of simplicity, I am presenting only the basic forms of locomotion that I can think of; some of these will require further decision making to determine the actual method used, sort of subclasses.

Stationary - a robot that does not change location on its own. A few examples would be robotic arms, tracking turrets and outdoor plant watering robots.
Wheeled/Roller - motor/servo driven wheels provide movement for this style of robot. This is the second most common method of robotic locomotion (stationary being the first).
Walker - the third most common form of robot movement involves a given number of legs rising and falling, or gyrating to push forward on wheels like a roller skater would. This would include bipeds as well.
Flyer - a robot capable of some form of flight or another, including hover-style motion. Limited hobby applications and more complex 3-Dimensional environment, but pretty cool stuff.
Swimmer - above and/or below water surface robotic motion that would present a variety of differing options on method of swimming. Like flying, this form of locomotion has limited hobby applications and a more complex 3-Dimensional environment.
Slitherer - snake like ground movement, which also presents the possibility of enhanced climbing capabilities within a larger 3-Dimensional environment.

Voting for the above topics will be enabled sometime on Monday, March 3, 2008. If you can think of a method of locomotion not listed above, please post a comment to let me know what I missed so I can include it. Keep in mind that teleportation is not a theoretical possibility at this moment. Bending space and time for warp propulsion is out of the realm of any hobbyist, instead think of something you would like to learn more on. Remember, the end result is to be a tutorial that other hobbyists can learn from and duplicate, not an experiment in complexity (although I do like making complex things simple). Happy voting.

You Design It

nospam@example.com (Andrew Maxim) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 09:45:36 -0800

I have two little interrelated quirks when it comes to projects, the first being that I need to be challenged, the second that I work best when taking on multiple projects simultaneously. The less challenged I am, the more projects I attempt to undertake (it keeps the voices in my head busy). This is no different when it comes to robotics, which has had the side effect of keeping me from building new robots. I have even managed to come up with several very challenging robotic ideas, but lack a real incentive to undertake the task.

This is one of the reasons that for the last few years I have been inventing and theorizing rather than building. It has definite bonuses in keeping my mind busy and presenting ongoing projects, but until each new invention comes to fruition or each theory produces something I am in need of, I will be slow in designing and building new robots. And I miss that.

To fix this I came up with a novel idea and presented it to the forum members over at the Society of Robots, you can view the post here. Basically the idea is to use this blog to continue to motivate me to build a specific robot; self motivation is after all one of the founding reasons for this blog. The idea is for you, my four readers, to create the overall design of the robot I am to build. It works like this:

Step 1. I present a design topic on said robot, listing the available options as I see them. An example being method of vision choices: (a) Black and White (b) Color
Step 2. For three days I will accept additional suggestions (via comments) related to the specific design topic, for instance if the topic is method of vision as listed above, you might suggest I include Infrared or Ultraviolet as choices.
Step 3. The design topic is presented as a poll or survey with the options I have come up with or you have suggested (within reason, asking for x-ray vision would be out of my price range EVER and thus not included as an option choice). The poll will stay open for a week or so to allow everyone to vote on the chosen design principle.
Step 4. Where applicable I will post an entry on the design choice decided upon including my theories on the topic, maybe some history, possible implementation methods, etc.
Step 5. If further options are available on a given design technology we will return back to Step 1, otherwise I will get to work building the given robot part and document it along the way. Once I have completed the piece, I will create an entry detailing what I did and how I did it, so you can follow along.
Step 6. We move on to the next part by going back to Step 1.

When all is said and done, we should have a working robot that you helped design, and more importantly, helped motivate me to build. The completed project will then get wrapped up and edited into a nice tutorial that I will post someplace here, as well as submitting it back over to the Society of Robots website. Obviously, there will be some design decisions along the way that I will just make, but for the most part it will all be up to my loyal readers, you, to design it.

Advancing Robotics - Connecting the Dots

nospam@example.com (Andrew Maxim) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:59:19 -0800

I am going to skip ahead of myself, past the few basic robotics entries I have wanted to make and jump to a topic that has been stirring in my mind for quite some time now. Not so ironically that topic is the mind, or at least the mind of a robot. Mostly what I wish to cover is theory; none of it is fact, very little is actually opinion, just theory. While I will be covering robotic AI of sorts, the reason the topic is theory is because the current human understanding of the brain, any level of brain, is still just theory.

I remember reading someplace that the most advanced microprocessors of the modern world are not even equivalent to the brain of a spider. I have watched television documentaries on robotics and seen how the collective "we" envision the future, but fall flat on our faces with its creation in the here and now. And then I have read articles by neurologists and on neurologists, and watched the documentaries on television, and have seen the news; and I understand why we believe the future of robotics is still the future, and why our processors are so weak compared to that of a spider. We do not understand.

Or rather, we understand large amounts of focused information, but can not see past that focus. There was a television show (I believe it was Beyond Tomorrow, but they are all a blur at this point) that covered studying the human brain and charting how the brain controls motor function. Scientists were using this with neuro-implants to allow patients (and a chimp) to control electronic devices. One of the studies showed the "brain waves" for a person rotating their arm (like a bird flapping motion), the odd thing was that the brain wave was only present during the initial upward part of each rotation, it went flat until the next time around. To the scientists studying this, that was the full signal for total muscle control over that movement. Pretty neat stuff.

Except a week prior I had watched a documentary on a scientist studying lampreys, or rather their spinal cord. Seems that a lamprey that is cut into two will have each section continue the swimming motion separately, as if the brain was telling the "tail half" to continue to swim and how to do that. What the scientist had figured out was that the spinal cord acts much like a "mini brain", controlling muscle movements independent of, and yet dependent on, the lamprey's brain. The spinal cord for a lamprey is "muscle memory". Same as in a human, and every other creature out there with a central nervous system.

Connecting the dots, which is something I always have been good at (even if I never could color in the lines); the brain waves the neurologists saw with rotating the arm really were not controlling the muscles. Instead it was a signal, a code of sorts that traveled to other parts of the brain and the spinal cord saying "rotate the right arm clockwise". The spinal cord then took over and told each muscle what to do with separate signals, sending a return signal back to the conscious brain saying "ok, done". While that was going on, and mind you it really is only a fraction of a second to rotate your arm, your conscious brain was free to do other things.

Did the light bulb go on there? Take that out to the next level. How does a creature see? What is vision? The eye is a sensor; it turns light into some sort of signal. Your brain does not process it all; or rather the conscious part of your brain can not be bothered with it. It only sees a tiny fraction of all the data. There is a part of your brain that takes optic information from your eye and does all sorts of data manipulation with it, pulling and pushing data all over the brain between memories, to subconscious eye movements, to focusing the lenses; all before any data is sent to the conscious mind to be processed. It even goes so far as to determine what, if anything, is important in the images it is collecting that the conscious brain should be aware of. It might even cause an override of muscle control without giving the conscious brain the chance to say "wait". This is why we duck when something is thrown at our head.

Audio, tactile, scent; the list goes on for sensor inputs with each having its own independent processing unit inside each brain. Muscle control, involuntary responses, muscle memory, autonomic functions (heart beating, breathing), gland control, temperature regulation, and on, and on, and on. The brain is not just medulla, cerebellum and cerebrum anymore, it never was just that. There are more individual parts to a spider's brain than sentences in this entry, and each one is autonomous, each acts on its own, but all act in concert with one another.

There might not be a single processor as powerful as the brain of a spider, but there is not a single portion of a spider's brain that is as powerful as a processor from ten years past. That is my theory. If we all start connecting the dots a little more, instead of just making larger dots, that theory will soon become robotic AI fact.