5 ms·

Hey it's my robot! I can field some questions if people are curious about anything in particular.

antognini 10y ago
Any relation to J.B.S. Haldane? I remember in one of my order of magnitude physics classes going through a problem to prove that all animals have a maximum jumping height of ~1 meter. J.B.S. Haldane made that observation in his paper On Being the Right Size: https://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html https://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html
- DHaldane 10y ago
  I do love that essay, but I'm no close relation of J.B.S.
jayajay 10y ago
Unleash a million of these on Mars, kind of like a scraper crawling websites for data.
FeepingCreature 10y ago
What happens if you take one, put it in a shock-absorbent coating (bubble wrap?) so it can take a bit of a fall, add a tiny low-res camera and hook it up to a neural network with the goal to maximize distance moved per second... then leave it alone in a room overnight? Or can it not get up on its own yet? [edit] If you add a thin piece of string to the top and connect it to the top of the room, I bet you can make a mechanism to set it upright when it falls over. Then it has all the time in the world to learn to land on its feet.
- grmarcil 10y ago
  See Animats' answer [1] to a similar NN suggestion in this thread. There are some research groups trying robotic control with black box neural networks (pixels in, control commands out), afaik with limited success so far, particularly with this many degrees of freedom. Deep learning has yielded some really incredible results the last 5+ years, but those results have been concentrated in a few areas (computer vision, speech recognition, game decision, ...). So there is a tendency to think NNs can do anything, but really a) setting up a NN to work with a problem is non-trivial (architecture design, data collection, data labeling, feature selection) and b) very much an open research topic for many problems, ie not guaranteed to work at all. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13121158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13121158
- DHaldane 10y ago
  I think I'd run out of room pretty quick. It hits 4.4 m/s on the first jump so I'd only have room for a couple hops. It would also need a tether to run overnight, and that's a tough proposition for a little robot bouncing around.

Any relation to J.B.S. Haldane? I remember in one of my order of magnitude physics classes going through a problem to prove that all animals have a maximum jumping height of ~1 meter. J.B.S. Haldane made that observation in his paper On Being the Right Size: https://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html https://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html

DHaldane 10y ago
I do love that essay, but I'm no close relation of J.B.S.

jayajay 10y ago

Unleash a million of these on Mars, kind of like a scraper crawling websites for data.

FeepingCreature 10y ago

What happens if you take one, put it in a shock-absorbent coating (bubble wrap?) so it can take a bit of a fall, add a tiny low-res camera and hook it up to a neural network with the goal to maximize distance moved per second... then leave it alone in a room overnight? Or can it not get up on its own yet? [edit] If you add a thin piece of string to the top and connect it to the top of the room, I bet you can make a mechanism to set it upright when it falls over. Then it has all the time in the world to learn to land on its feet.

grmarcil 10y ago
See Animats' answer [1] to a similar NN suggestion in this thread. There are some research groups trying robotic control with black box neural networks (pixels in, control commands out), afaik with limited success so far, particularly with this many degrees of freedom. Deep learning has yielded some really incredible results the last 5+ years, but those results have been concentrated in a few areas (computer vision, speech recognition, game decision, ...). So there is a tendency to think NNs can do anything, but really a) setting up a NN to work with a problem is non-trivial (architecture design, data collection, data labeling, feature selection) and b) very much an open research topic for many problems, ie not guaranteed to work at all. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13121158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13121158
DHaldane 10y ago
I think I'd run out of room pretty quick. It hits 4.4 m/s on the first jump so I'd only have room for a couple hops. It would also need a tether to run overnight, and that's a tough proposition for a little robot bouncing around.