Multiple Robots Use Single Brain

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Friday, 5 of June , 2009 at 4:07 am

There are two general visions for household robots: one robot that can do everything, or a bunch of robots that can each do one or two things. Monty would be an example of the former, and a Roomba might be a part of the latter. Having a bunch of specialized bots is, if less efficient, a more realistic short term goal, and researchers at the University of Hertfordshire are working on creating one unified “brain” that can handle a bunch* of different bots.

The system is designed so that any robot in the house can adopt a single “personality” of sorts. When you ask a robot to do something, you’re giving commands to that centralized personality instead of an individual robot. If the particular robot you’re talking to can’t do what you want it to do, another robot will take over, still using the same personalized interface, which means that each robot can respond to different users without requiring different programming. It’s sort of a cloud computing solution for robots, where the software isn’t hardware dependent.

Normally, robot software is extremely (I might argue, excessively) hardware dependent, and this is something that (in my opinion) is holding the robotics industry back as a whole. As it stands, if you write a program for one robot, it’s difficult to get other robots to run the same program, even if they’re similar, and the more different the robot is, the harder it is to make things cross-platform compatible. Being able to program one brain, and have it run different tasks on different bots, would be a major step forward towards interoperability.

VIA [ New Scientist ]

*Is there a collective noun for a group of robots? If not, we need to come up with one. Suggestions, anyone?

Comments (3)

Category: Artificial Intelligence, Consumer

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3 Comments

Comment by Ironman

Made Friday, 5 of June , 2009 at 12:09 pm

a platoon? a swarm? a gaggle?

Comment by Joey1058

Made Friday, 5 of June , 2009 at 2:27 pm

I’ve been a big supporter of this concept for years. Ever since I read about personal agents that reside on PDAs. This is back almost ten years ago now. It’s nice to see that the idea is being reconsidered! Your home AI resides on the house network. You just say out loud “please bring me a drink.” The refridgerator asks “what kind?” You say “beer”. Any random kids toy with a gripping feature sitting idle after your children have gone outside powers up. The fridge opens up and the toy grabs the drink. Of course this is all going to work much better now that Microsoft has introduced Natal for the XBox 360. :-)

Comment by Joey1058

Made Friday, 5 of June , 2009 at 2:35 pm

BTW, the names for a group of robots: in this concept, “team” seems best to me.