LittleDog Gets Smarter, More Confident
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 24 of May , 2010 at 3:56 am
Our last LittleDog update was back in September, when we watched the robot walking on posts and doing dramatic death dives. In this latest version (in terms of software, I assume) of LittleDog from MIT, the robot moves noticeably faster and smoother, and seems more reliable overall, especially over rough and unfamiliar terrain.
It’s interesting to see how LittleDog’s ‘brain’ has been improved… The way that the robot chooses foot placement, for example, uses generalized templates of safe foot positions to determine foot placement on unfamiliar rocks, which is a process that we humans can relate to. Your head contains a database of rock templates, built up from your experiences with rocks. If you’re trying to figure out where to safely stand on an unfamiliar rock, you’re probably thinking about what other rocks you’ve stood on before and comparing them to the current rock to decide whether or not you can stand on it. This may not be an entirely conscious process, but humans (and other animals) learn from experience, and use generalized experiences to help decide what to do in specific instances in the present, and the consequences of those instances help to refine the generalized experience and increase our overall robustness. So anyway, this is basically what LittleDog is now doing. Pretty cool.
As far as I know, while all of LittleDog’s behaviors are autonomous, it does depend on an overhead view of its path, provided by an external camera mounted above the course. Finding a way to integrate sensors capable of providing the information that LittleDog needs to decide where to place its feet is probably a project that’s entirely separate from what MIT’s Computational Learning and Motor Control Lab is trying to accomplish, but now that LittleDog has gotten so good at the whole walking over rough terrain thing, making the robot self sufficient seems like it could be an obvious next step, as it were.
Comments (4)
Category: Biorobotics,Research
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Comment by Kenneth
Made Monday, 24 of May , 2010 at 6:31 pm
How can you run a robot blog and start a whole paragraph of conjecture about the relative merits/skill sets of two robot labs based entirely on conjecture? Why don’t yo find out about littleDog and overhead cameras?
Comment by Evan Ackerman
Made Monday, 24 of May , 2010 at 6:44 pm
Um, I’m not talking about two robot labs at all. My comment was that while it would be cool to have LittleDog NOT depend on overhead cameras, that doesn’t seem to be what CLMC is working on.
And, the fact that LittleDog depends on overhead cameras is not conjecture; here’s a picture of what you don’t see in most of the videos:
Comment by Evan Ackerman
Made Monday, 24 of May , 2010 at 6:51 pm
Also, you can find a bit more detail on how LittleDog relies on cameras in the other posts that I linked to in the first paragraph (http://www.botjunkie.com/2009/09/08/littledog-locomotion-research-is-exhausting/):
“LittleDog, remember, is teaching itself the most efficient way to negotiate these surfaces. Overhead cameras examine the terrain and plan out LittleDog’s route by computing a ‘cost’ for each step, which takes into account the distance moved towards the goal as well as the potential for a fall. After a lot of trial and error, LittleDog figures out how to best compromise between progress and stability, and the lessons it learns could be propagated up to other, larger quadruped robots.”
Comment by void
Made Tuesday, 25 of May , 2010 at 8:57 am
Soon we’ll see some of this with a gun mounted on its back.
Have an EMP prepared.
LOL
