Lecture 4 – Robotics and Kinetics

Everyone seems to love robot. Development in the field of robotic are getting faster and faster and science fiction movies scenarios don’t seems impossible anymore. For this week lecture, the major problem and solution in the field of robotic are presented.

As I have a natural interest for robotic myself, most improvement in the field presented in the text were not new for me. As interesting and important “task oriented” robots are, I strongly believe the bottom-up approach and more biological inspired robots is the best path to follow to build more interesting robots. The author of the text also give much importance to development of robotic based on bottom-up structure. There exist different experiment to try and develop physical system similar to biological model (ex: human-shaped walking robot) and also, most interesting maybe, development of learning systems artificial intelligence closer to biological system (ex: swarm intelligence).

In addition to technical consideration, the text also present the importance of artist participation in some research. Artist are expert in representing anatomy and movement, they might be the best person to develop robots that reproduce natural system. For example, when it come to movement, we can easily say that animator are the expert in understanding it. In the text, with the different example of successful robots, a good part of success seems to be based on actual decision and good understanding of things like walk-cycle and balance. In all case, it seems like artists are and will continue to be important part in the design and development of robots.

Links:

US Army robot: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4199935.stm