While we were talking about the rationality of Mole-rat behavior in class today, I couldn’t help but think back to an article I read a few months ago concerning a new mine-clearing robot being developed for the DoD. Interestingly enough, it appears to bear a striking resemblance to the robots being developed by Rodney Brooks.
This part of the article gave me pause:
The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it.
This has bad results, of course, if you’re a human. But not so much if you’re a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That’s why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test […]
Original post by crain2mn