Artificial Life and Robotics
Artificial life is the science of creating lifelike
behaviour in man-made systems that consist of populations of
autonomous entities whose local interactions can be specified by
simple rules. Emergent behaviours may become apparent in such
populations as time progresses even though there are no such rules for
such high level behaviours in any individual entity.
An offshoot of artificial life is about the creation of machines
which operate in the real-world by themselves over an extended time
period. These machines are known as Autonomous Agents.
I belong to the class of people using the
Physical Grounding Theorem this
basically states that using extensive simulation of behaviours in
computer generated environments is misleading. To build
real machines that operate in the real environment
is the goal of people using the physical grounding hypothisis.
All my machines have been influenced to some degree by the
Subsumption Architecture a design
architecture for building mobile robots proposed by Rodney Brooks
of MIT.
To date I have built three classes of machines:
Sheep and the Flock. (1996 - )
- The sheep are complex small machines based on my Flexible Architecture.
The pictured prototype does not have the analog IO card that
enables its bretheren to hear and make noises in the world.
Designed for research into group behavious, several sheep will form
Sheffield Hallam Universitys' Flock.
- Preston, an ongoing project with Karl Brammer. (1996 - )
- Based on a six wheel model vehicle, Preston is the largest
mobile robot so far. Its waterproof, designed for an outdoor
existence and with a top speed of bleeding quick, slightly
dangerous to your ankles. Designed with reasearch into behaviour
switching/modification in mind. Two Prestons are actually under
construction.
- SAM built with Jeremy A. Laycock. (1989 - 1990)
- Built as a third year BSc project at Kent University
this machine currently resides in Kents' Digital Systems Laborotory.
Presently my only machine to own a medal (Silver), recieved at
the First Robot Olympics which Jeremy and I attended.
Some useful Indexs:
Sensor Index
- A useful description of all the sensors used by the Sheep and
Preston machines. Includes specifications and how they are used
and programmed.
- Alife and Robotics Notes
- Explanations and notes from my MSc thesis about some of the
more unfamiliar topics discussed in these pages. It includes
a Bibliography for further
reference.
The Sheep and Preston are built from the same modular technology
that I designed for my Msc Project. Were hoping to build other
machines using this technology including (these will not be a part
of the Phd):
- Bigger Mobile Robots. The base used in Preston can only support
fifteen concurrent processors while the sheep use three each. There
is literally no limit to the number of processors that the Flexible
Architecture can support so a single machine with several hundred
processors is a real possibility.
- Flying Mobile Robots. This depends on the miniturisation of
the Flexible Architecture and the assosiated processor and
I/O boards.
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