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I studied Tilden's design of "neural network" when I was a young student. Even in early 2000's, his designs were popular, and he published a book. This partic

by quanto 5y ago

I studied Tilden's design of "neural network" when I was a young student. Even in early 2000's, his designs were popular, and he published a book. This particular robot was designed in the 90's, and I believe he had a more complex, spider-looking robot later. What I found fascinating was that even with a few "analog neurons" he could engineer a complex behavior that was driving the walking gait, obstacle avoidance, and in case of solar-powered bots, sunlight seeking (thus sustaining themselves). In this age of trillion transistors and massive GPU-powered neural networks, his designs may seem almost trivial. However, I always appreciated the clever thought that went into such a simple but effective design.

cameron_b 5y ago
I devoured the BEAM ideas in high school ( graduated in 2005 ) and the analog neuron ideas were so interesting to me. Is anyone but Solarbotics working on this anymore? ( they also seem to just sell the kits of robots made in 20-years ago )
JKCalhoun 5y ago
He called it a nervous network. http://faq.solarbotics.net/nvnet.html http://faq.solarbotics.net/nvnet.html
HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
It's surprising how few rules are required for very complex emergent behavior. In the early 2000's I wrote a simulation of autonomous "agents" following a Brooks subsumption architecture. The individual bots had, IIRC, about 4 rules and the goal was to get them to collectively push a load off the screen. There were 90 agents and after starting the system, they would typically accomplish that goal in less than a minute. I wish I'd had the funding to actually build the physical agents since that would have been far more eye opening -- would be a lot cheaper to do it these days with the availability of cheap arduino clones, etc. -- but it still made for a cool class project.
- quanto 5y ago
  Indeed, the way emergent behaviors arise from simple rules is interesting, but to the best of my knowledge, analytically intractable for all but most simple cases. The converse way (from desired emergent behaviors to the engineered simple rules) is also intractable, perhaps even more challenging than the other way. If you know existing literature on these topics, I would appreciate some pointers.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
    I haven't been involved in this stuff for quite some time: my career has been more about specific types of automation rather than general robotics, so unfortunately I don't.

by quanto 5y ago

cameron_b 5y ago

I devoured the BEAM ideas in high school ( graduated in 2005 ) and the analog neuron ideas were so interesting to me. Is anyone but Solarbotics working on this anymore? ( they also seem to just sell the kits of robots made in 20-years ago )

JKCalhoun 5y ago

He called it a nervous network. http://faq.solarbotics.net/nvnet.html http://faq.solarbotics.net/nvnet.html

HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago

It's surprising how few rules are required for very complex emergent behavior. In the early 2000's I wrote a simulation of autonomous "agents" following a Brooks subsumption architecture. The individual bots had, IIRC, about 4 rules and the goal was to get them to collectively push a load off the screen. There were 90 agents and after starting the system, they would typically accomplish that goal in less than a minute. I wish I'd had the funding to actually build the physical agents since that would have been far more eye opening -- would be a lot cheaper to do it these days with the availability of cheap arduino clones, etc. -- but it still made for a cool class project.

quanto 5y ago
Indeed, the way emergent behaviors arise from simple rules is interesting, but to the best of my knowledge, analytically intractable for all but most simple cases. The converse way (from desired emergent behaviors to the engineered simple rules) is also intractable, perhaps even more challenging than the other way. If you know existing literature on these topics, I would appreciate some pointers.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  I haven't been involved in this stuff for quite some time: my career has been more about specific types of automation rather than general robotics, so unfortunately I don't.