I consider my childhood deprived because robots
were not sophisticated or cheap enough to be
toys. This is changing fast. It was in 2001
that I saw the first domestic robot hard at
work, it was cutting the lawn of a hotel I was
staying at. It looked like an upturned bucket,
a sort of castrated midget dalek, and I suspect
it had less sophistication than a Tetris game,
but I thought it was pretty cool.
Robot Wars TV shows where radio-controlled machines
try to destroy one another are great fun, (though
I’ve watched very few) but I do not really
consider those fighting machines to be robots
any more than a remote controlled car is a robot
(or a
real car for that matter). If
they are being manually driven then they are
not robots as far as I am concerned. A real
robot must do its stuff autonomously.
Having said that about cars, systems such as
the engine combined with the management system
are robotic in a sense. I will explain shortly.
We think of robots as being mobile and even
humanoid. Decent humanoid robots - androids
- are many years off. If anything has the power
to revolutionise industry, especially the sex
industry, it is flexible, sleepless, ungreedy,
untiring androids. Modern day androids are too
clumsy and dangerous to have around people in
most situations: they are slow; have poor battery
life; they are immensely stupid even by politicians'
standards; they cannot navigate even a slightly
complex environment and they are hand crafted
by specialist engineers and so it is not surprising
that androids cost the price of a house.
Robots on wheels are more common: an object
with a low centre of gravity and a wheel on
each corner are nice and stable - on flat ground
that is. In contrast we bipeds exist in a permanent
state (when upright) of instability (even when
sober). When you walk you are actually off-balance
the entire time. If you were to freeze at any
moment you would topple over. Even standing
still on two legs requires an amazing amount
of activity and coordination by the brain, control
centres in the spine and muscles just to keep
you upright. All of this is subconscious, so
we think of walking and standing as easy and
passive. Robot engineers know otherwise.
Robots are beginning to invade our homes. Aibo
is a toy robot dog built by the Japs. This plastic
mutt is a huge commercial success. Aibo does
not require exercise and constant care; consume
tons of meat; crap; drool; catch flees; aggravate
allergies; moult; bark; savage children or try
to screw your leg. Those features will no doubt
be engineered into future models. Aibo will
probably spy on you and send back all information
to corporations so they can hurl customised
adverts at you and commit sundry other abuses.
Then there is the concept of the immobile
robot - or immobot. Immobots are
supposed
to be a new concept. The idea is that a immobot
is a machine that has no limbs, wheels etc
but can model its environment and interact
with it effectively via non-specific programming.
An immobot is a an autonomous yet non-moving
robot. Immobots are hype for an old idea.
Control engineers have been designing and
building immobots for decades.
Control engineering is automation, whether
of factories and other industrial plants,
space probes or whatever. Naturally, control
systems are used increasingly as automation
technology becomes ever more sophisticated.
Most modern control systems are immobots.
The control system's
body can range
in size from the humble to the huge, think
power stations, oil rigs and car plants. You
have nerve-like sensors continuously gathering
data from the plant and feeding it to the
brain-like control system, which responds
by sending signals out to control the plant.
The "brain's" software models its
physical "body" (For example the
factory or space probe) using combinations
of algorithms as simple PID or expert systems
to the exotic such as neural networks or artificial
intelligence through physical modeling of
the environment. The control is exerted via
machines such as valves, pumps, that sort
of thing.
A control system can be thought of as a vast
autonomous robot that can be overridden to
varying degrees by human operators. But they
are designed such that they respond correctly
(hopefully) without human intervention. The
system must do the right thing when shit strikes
fans (loss of inputs and outputs, fires, chemical
explosions, nuclear melt-down, that kind of
thing) even when information is incomplete
and the exact nature of the failure is unanticipated
by the programmers. The interesting thing
about control systems is that they are too
complex to be understood in their entirety,
firstly because their environment can never
be completely modeled and secondly because
of the staggering number of possible interactions
between the many lines of software code and
hardware components. These systems need to
be autonomous and have always been designed
that way from the ground up: they are immobots
and they are doing much of the work that people
used to do, and more.
This is not to say that control system immobots
are perfect. There have been many disasters
and always will be. One huge problem is alarm
cascades. A failure can lead to more failures
causing an avalanche of error messages. An
operator may need to intervene at some point,
as human intelligence is better than that
of immobot AI for many situations. The operator
will certainly need to know what is going
on. But if he is bombarded with errors from
the immobot, then he will have trouble isolating
the nature of the problem. There is no such
thing as a perfect system, remember
that
when politicians tell you nuke plants are
perfectly safe. (Or anything else for that
matter).
No one calls control systems
robots
because they do not usually have two arms,
two legs like C3PO. They do not even look
like R2D2. Yet :) But the robots are out there
and they are in control.
But what of androids? IMNSHO a robot could
never be human in all respects. For one thing,
no doubt after a deranged bout of market research,
such a plastic beast would have the advantage
of an electrically powered phallus that, once
plugged into the mains, would have the potential
to hammer a wench into deepest heavenly ecstasy,
into which no man could hope to follow. Except
maybe me on a good day, but I am not having
many good days :) The question of if you could
not tell the difference between an android
and a human is as pointless as asking whether
a chess playing robot that could only strategise
as badly as me would be worth playing. The
android will eventually win, because it is
not subject to the un-zen of the human psyche.
Add your comment to this page
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| From: |
MadPole | Subject: | 2002-12-06 07:07:02 |
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| From: |
MadPole | Subject: | 2002-12-06 07:23:54 |
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| From: |
MadPole | Subject: | 2002-12-06 07:28:39 |
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| From: |
Carrie | Subject: | 2003-10-18 10:31:14 |
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| From: |
anthony | Subject: | 2004-07-27 23:48:30 |
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| From: |
Liya Walsh | Subject: | 2008-01-22 23:35:59 |
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| From: |
lilly | Subject: | 2008-01-22 23:40:15 |
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