Tags / 11 quotes from 1 source
#robotics
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Shakey and the sense-model-plan-act cycle
Shakey’s design mirrors the traditional view that an agent should be decomposed into four functional components. This model revolves around the sense-model-plan-act cycle. First, the agent senses the world. Then a model of the world is constructed on the basis of the sensory…
Shakey ignored the real world
The planning design was monolithic. After the plan was set into action, Shakey largely ignored feedback from the real world. For example, if someone secretly removed the block Shakey was interested in, he would become very confused.
Brooks: get the basics right first
The MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks takes the evolutionary basics as evidence that “hard” tasks like reasoning, planning and language might turn out to be easier to understand once the basics are in place.
Mechanical creatures before mechanical humans
Can our knowledge of evolution inform AI? Brooks believes that it can, and argues that we should first aim to build basic mechanical creatures before we try to build mechanical humans.
Intelligence requires a body
The degree to which embodiment is significant remains a controversial issue. Rodney Brooks goes as far as to say, “Intelligence requires a body.” For example, the design of a robot body will determine the sensory phenomena it experiences.
The world is its own best model
Situatedness refers to an agent being located in a complex environment, rather than a highly abstracted micro-world. The complexities of real environments are taken to be fundamentally different from those of the abstracted “micro-worlds”. Indeed, being situated permits the…
Bottom-up versus top-down AI design
Given the goal of building an intelligent agent, the methodology frequently adopted by Al is to build from the top downwards. That is, higher-level functions such as knowledge and reasoning are targeted first, with lower-level Junctions swept under the carpet until later. New…
Behaviors in parallel, with no central control
Behaviours are built on, to yield more complex behaviours. Unlike much of conventional robotics, which takes the sense-model-plan-act cycle as a starting point, Brooks’ robots contain pieces of machinery that are autonomous and operate in parallel. There is no central control…
Genghis walks with fifty-one tiny programs
Genghis has no central control. Nowhere in his construction is there a description of how to walk. “The software for Genghis was not organized as a single program but rather as fifty-one little tiny parallel programs.”
Robotics failed its 1950s predictions
“In stark contrast to the largely unanticipated explosion of computers into the mainstream, the entire endeavour of robotics has failed rather completely to live up to the predictions of the 1950s." Hans Moravec Most people know what robots are and could perhaps even name a…
Robot: The Future of Flesh and Machines (reference)
•Rodney Brooks, Robot: The Future of Flesh and Machines (London: Penguin, 2002).