War is hell, they say. So perhaps it's not surprising the stuff of nightmares is funded by the military. The US military to be precise. Yes, the American Army is putting cash dollars into into a robotic cockroach. What's more, it's an intelligent, robotic cockroach.
This is all the work of boffins at the University of California-Berkeley, who have discovered that an automaton that moves like a bug will become smarter, without the need for extra software or programming.
"A machine of any size or shape can be given greater intelligence."
The robot they've created has a fine, domed shell, and can manoeuvre through a test course despite its lack of sophisticated sensors. Which leads to the unavoidable conclusion that a machine of any size or shape can be given greater intelligence, not by manipulating its on-board computer, but simply by adjusting its shape.
Make no mistake, this is ground-breaking stuff. With enormous investment being made into artificial intelligence, it appears all that research and development might be short-circuited if robots simply had the capacity to adjust their form to better suit their surroundings.
"The work was partly paid for by the US Army Research Laboratory."
These remarkable findings, recently been published in the journal of Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, and reported on wired.co.uk, may form the basis of a new generation of moving machines for the domestic market. But it won't be surprising to see them appear in a combat setting first; bearing in mind the work was at least partially paid for by the US Army Research Laboratory.
Talking to Wired, Chen Li of University of California Berkeley said: "The majority of robotics studies have been solving the problem of obstacles by avoiding them, which largely depends on using sensors to map out the environment and algorithms that plan a path to go around obstacles... However, when the terrain becomes densely cluttered, especially as gaps between obstacles become comparable or even smaller than robot size, this approach starts to run into problems as a clear path cannot be mapped."
"The roaches were fitted with different shells."
That's where the cockroaches come in. Using vertical spikes to imitate jungle-like grasses, they set the insects running through an obstacle course and measured their performance. Next, the roaches were fitted with different shells: one oval, one rectangular and another flattened circle -- and re-ran the task. The cockroaches with the less rounded bodies struggled to perform as well.
Perhaps that's to be expected. But when the researchers posed the same challenge to a six-legged robot, the results were repeated. The only changes made to the machine were the alternate shells, not the software. It emerged that it was the shape alone that created increased intelligence.
The authors of the study sum up the conclusions this way: "There may be other shapes besides the thin, rounded one that are good for other purposes, such as climbing up and over obstacles of other types. Our next steps will be to study a diversity of terrain and animal shapes to discover more 'terradynamic' shapes, and even morphing shapes. These new concepts will enable terrestrial robots to go through various cluttered environments with minimal sensors and simple controls."
Cockroach-shaped military bots. Coming to a war-zone near you very soon.
Magnus Shaw is a copywriter and blogger.
