Modular Robotics

I showed this to my family a few months ago...


They didn't get it. I was unbelievably excited when I saw this video. All ten minutes of it. They just sat there looking a little bored and started complaining very quickly. If anything I thought my younger brothers might be impressed by the implications for real life Transformers.

To me this is what the future of robotics will be: small uniform cell-like components that rearrange to perform a task. Of course, these modules are still fairly large and will need a few re-designs to get them on the same scale as biological cells. But as far as I can tell this is the right direction to be going in. A lot of people will possibly disagree, but I think the major advances that will be seen in robotics will be biologically inspired.

The main argument I see for this is that the process of robotics research has been slowly developing over the last century or so, with some great stumbling blocks in terms of creating any naturalistic movement e.g. walking. However the process of evolution has been tackling these problems waaaay longer, and so we are likely to see some 'designs' already optimised for these problems in Biology. This does of course require actually understanding the biophysics of each solution, but implementing these solutions in robots could actually be used to validate understanding. In the case of the above robot, it isn't really addressing anything like biophysically plausible motion (it's more an exercise in logic programming as far as I can tell) but I can see something like being used as a model of skeletal cells, which can be applied to motion.

One argument against this I've heard, is that by studying Biophysics we are only studying one implementation of the problem, rather than creating an appropriate solution, e.g., we didn't need to study birds to build the aeroplane. However I would argue that the computational constraints we see in robotics controllers are in many cases the same as in neural controllers, so by studying the optimal solution found in neural controllers and implementing in a robotic controller would actually solve the problem at hand.

So far, I've seen some of the work in Edinburgh looking at insect motion (I turned down the opportunity to work with these- a slight hint of regret), which isn't using anything modular like this. So it may even be the case that it is unnecessary to use modular components at all to create decent biologically inspired designs. Ignoring issues of complexity (I can hear the dismissal of my argument already), tackling these issues with more modular designs seems like a worthy pursuit.