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I have many books on on robotics and AI from Stanford and MIT from that era, back when I started to get deeply involved in the field. My son is about a year aw
by robomartin 6y ago
I have many books on on robotics and AI from Stanford and MIT from that era, back when I started to get deeply involved in the field. My son is about a year away from graduating with degrees in CS and Robotics. He was quite surprised to realize that much of what he is learning today isn't new at all. Tremendous work was done decades ago in both domains. Put simply, you can only get so far with neural networks when your only option is an 8 bit microprocessor with 64k-bytes of RAM and a a megabyte or two of non-volatile storage.
One of the key differences between now and then is the monumental improvement in computing power, sensors, hardware in general and energy storage. As a result the devices we produce today look far more impressive. Think about it this way: I don't think there's anything in a Roomba that did not exist in the 1980's other than far greater computing power at a very low cost.
It is an interesting exercise to look through the Old Robots site (www.theoldrobots.com). One of my favorite's (because I owned one and still have a couple of arms on the shelf) is the Hero 2000:
http://www.theoldrobots.com/hero2k.html http://www.theoldrobots.com/hero2k.html
Check out the specifications here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERO_(robot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERO_(robot)
It took an Intel 8088 processor and 11 Z-80 8 bit processors to run this thing in the early 90's. That cost thousands of dollars. Today you can to a thousand times more with a $5 to $30 single chip processor.
- robomartin 6y agoAnd speaking of legged robots, this interesting bot showed-up in the early '80's. I remember it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWX9iRw33OE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWX9iRw33OE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHoJ2naN5HI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHoJ2naN5HI Again, considering available computing power, sensors, etc., this was nothing short of amazing.
- areoform 6y agoIt's under-appreciated just how brilliant the initial set of AI and Robotics pioneers were. Our future lies in the past. Would you be open to digitizing these books via the Internet Archive, or something similar? If they're sufficiently technical, you may have the only copy in the world for some of them.
- robomartin 6y agoSome of these books are still around ih various forms, for example: https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Artificial-Intelligence-Avron-Barr/dp/0865760055 https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Artificial-Intelligence-Avro... https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/parallel-distributed-processing-volume-1 https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/parallel-distributed-processi... https://www.amazon.com/Neural-Massively-Parallel-Computers-Branko-Soucek/dp/0471635332 https://www.amazon.com/Neural-Massively-Parallel-Computers-B... https://www.amazon.com/Connection-Machine-Press-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0262081571/ https://www.amazon.com/Connection-Machine-Press-Artificial-I... https://www.amazon.com/Legged-Robots-Balance-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/0262181177 https://www.amazon.com/Legged-Robots-Balance-Artificial-Inte... https://www.amazon.com/Machines-That-Walk-Adaptive-Suspension/dp/0262192748 https://www.amazon.com/Machines-That-Walk-Adaptive-Suspensio... ...and more.
- bigiain 6y ago> I don't think there's anything in a Roomba that did not exist in the 1980's other than far greater computing power at a very low cost. High energy density batteries as well. My off-brand Roomba clone uses 4 18650 lipo cells @40-50g each, a total of ~40WHr for under 200g. That 40WHr would need about 1kg of lead acid battery, or maybe 7-800g of NiCad battery.
- robomartin 6y agoYup. Correct. I did mention high energy density storage in my original comment.