Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Friday, June 02, 2006
On tardigrades and robotic pets
Sorry for fanning out into completely out-of-topic fields, but as I happened to study up on tardigrades and at the same time came upon the Ugobe Pleo I started to connect some dots.
What can these things possibly have in common? A lot actually, as robotic pets like the Pleo and tardigrades have similar features: light sensing but not sight, touch sensors, simple locomotion, some form of brain for learning and coordination, etc. Of course there are things the Pleo clearly can't do, like being frozen down to close to 0 degrees Kelvin and survive to tell the story. This was why tardigrades caught my attention in the first place. Also, tardigrades are very small: They eat by puncturing and sucking out individual plant cells. That's tiny!
When talking robots many think man-like robots, which are insanely complex to make even though many try, missing out on the fact that most animals are very primitive yet extremely successful and dynamic. Hence, there's a lot to learn from simpler life forms when making useful self-learning robots.
Most robots today are not self-learning at all. Even if they can adapt to what is being sensed they rather rely on a fixed script with a fixed set of conditions for performing their "behavior". The future is in self-learning and self-adaptation, as it will simply be too complex to tell a robot all possible conditions it can run into and all possible reactions to them. Especially when robots get e.g. real sight and hearing.
Tardigrades (Tardigrada): images, video clips, text and monthly magazine.
Ugobe
