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Robot learns to fly
August 14, 2002EMBARGOED UNTIL WEDNESDAY 14 AUGUST 2002 19:00 BST
UK CONTACT - Claire Bowles, New Scientist Press Office, London:
Tel: +44(0)20 7331 2751 or email claire.bowles@rbi.co.uk
LEARNING how to fly took nature millions of years of trial and error. But a winged robot has cracked it in only a few hours, using the same evolutionary principles.
Krister Wolff and Peter Nordin of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, built a winged robot and set about testing whether it could learn to fly by itself, without any pre-programmed data on what flapping is or how to do it.
The robot had metre-long wings made from balsa wood and covered with a light plastic film. Small motors on the robot let it move its wings forwards or backwards, up or down or twist them in either direction.
The team attached the robot to two vertical rods, so it could slide up and down. At the start of a test, the robot was suspended by an elastic band. A movement detector measured how much lift, if any, the robot produced for any given movement.
A computer program fed the robot random instructions, at the rate of 20 per second, to test its flapping abilities. Each instruction told the robot either to do nothing or to move the wings slightly in the various directions.
Feedback from the movement detector let the program work out which sets of instructions were best at producing lift. The most successful ones were paired up and "offspring" sets of instructions were generated by swapping instructions randomly between successful pairs. These next-generation instructions were then sent to the robot and evaluated before breeding a new generation, and so on.
To begin with, the robot just twitched and jerked erratically. But, gradually, it made movements that gained height. At first, it cheated- simply standing on its wing tips was one early short cut. But Wolff later found that the robot had used its wings to climb up on some objects that had been left underneath the robot by mistake (see Graphic).
After three hours, however, the robot abandoned such methods in favour of a more effective flapping technique, where it rotated its wings through 90 degrees and raised them before twisting them back to the horizontal and pushing down.
While the robot had worked out how best to produce lift, it wasn`t about to take off. "This tells us that this kind of evolution is capable of coming up with flying motion," says Peter Bentley, who works on evolutionary computing at University College London. "But there`s only so much that evolution can do. This thing is never going to fly because the motors will never have the strength to do it," he says.
By Ian Sample
http://www.newscientist.com">New Scientist issue 17th August 2002
PLEASE MENTION NEW SCIENTIST AS THE SOURCE OF THIS STORY AND, IF PUBLISHING ONLINE, PLEASE CARRY A HYPERLINK TO : http://www.newscientist.com"> http://www.newscientist.com
New Scientist
Krister Wolff and Peter Nordin of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, built a winged robot and set about testing whether it could learn to fly by itself, without any pre-programmed data on what flapping is or how to do it.
The robot had metre-long wings made from balsa wood and covered with a light plastic film. Small motors on the robot let it move its wings forwards or backwards, up or down or twist them in either direction.
The team attached the robot to two vertical rods, so it could slide up and down. At the start of a test, the robot was suspended by an elastic band. A movement detector measured how much lift, if any, the robot produced for any given movement.
A computer program fed the robot random instructions, at the rate of 20 per second, to test its flapping abilities. Each instruction told the robot either to do nothing or to move the wings slightly in the various directions.
Feedback from the movement detector let the program work out which sets of instructions were best at producing lift. The most successful ones were paired up and "offspring" sets of instructions were generated by swapping instructions randomly between successful pairs. These next-generation instructions were then sent to the robot and evaluated before breeding a new generation, and so on.
To begin with, the robot just twitched and jerked erratically. But, gradually, it made movements that gained height. At first, it cheated- simply standing on its wing tips was one early short cut. But Wolff later found that the robot had used its wings to climb up on some objects that had been left underneath the robot by mistake (see Graphic).
After three hours, however, the robot abandoned such methods in favour of a more effective flapping technique, where it rotated its wings through 90 degrees and raised them before twisting them back to the horizontal and pushing down.
While the robot had worked out how best to produce lift, it wasn`t about to take off. "This tells us that this kind of evolution is capable of coming up with flying motion," says Peter Bentley, who works on evolutionary computing at University College London. "But there`s only so much that evolution can do. This thing is never going to fly because the motors will never have the strength to do it," he says.
By Ian Sample
http://www.newscientist.com">New Scientist issue 17th August 2002
PLEASE MENTION NEW SCIENTIST AS THE SOURCE OF THIS STORY AND, IF PUBLISHING ONLINE, PLEASE CARRY A HYPERLINK TO : http://www.newscientist.com"> http://www.newscientist.com
New Scientist
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