Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

Researchers have a working robotic fly. However, despite news stories of spying I can find no references to cameras or other spy equipment embedded in the flies so no need to panic yet.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley are building a minuscule robot guaranteed to give new meaning to the old phrase, “fly on the wall.”

Known affectionately as “robofly,” the gadget is exactly what its name implies: a flying robot about the size of a housefly. It even looks a bit like a fly, although it will have four wings instead of two and one glassy eye instead of two beady ones.

Uncle Sam, who is bankrolling the project to the tune of $2.5 million and wants to see robofly airborne by 2004, will add the flying robot to its espionage toy box.

“The potential application of a robot based on a fly might be, in an urban environment, clandestine surveillance and reconnaissance,” said Teresa McMullen of the Office of Naval Research. . . [ read more Spy fly - Tiny winged robot to mimic nature's fighter jets ]

Scientists in England have a robot that powers itself eating flies so you can just get one of those to keep your home free of robotic flies.

r Chris Melhuish and his Bristol-based team hope the robot, called EcoBot II, will one day be sent into zones too dangerous for humans, potentially proving invaluable in military, security and industrial areas.

Melhuish, who is director of the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab at the UWE, told CNN that the EcoBot II was a result of a quest for an intelligent robot that could function without human supervision.

“That means they need energy. It is one thing to have a robot getting its energy from a household socket, or maybe from the factory floor, but it is another thing when the robot goes outside buildings,” he said. [ read more Fly eating robot powers itself ]

But if you don’t have a fly eating robot — fear not and remove the tinfoil hat; Endgadget is reporting hawks are hunting down WowWee Dragonfly bots. I’m thinking if you are concerned about fly bots spying on you you just need to attract a few fly eating birds to your yard.

More information:
Robotic fly to descend on New York
Robotic fly gets its buzz
Tinker, Tailor, Robot, Fly

Polyworld is an evolutionary environment with simulated physics that allows you create creatures that will evolve. The creatures are free form neural networks. It was created by Larry Yaeger. They will learn to find food, become or hunt prey and mate and have children. It is open source, code is available at Source Forge ( link below ) and it does have versions for Windows, Linux and OSX.

Although we have had great success solving toy problems in artificial environments evolved creatures in virtual environments haven’t found great success in solving real world problems yet.

PolyWorld is a computational ecology that I developed to explore issues in Artificial Life. Simulated organisms reproduce sexually, fight and kill and eat each other, eat the food that grows throughout the world, and either develop successful strategies for survival or die. An organism’s entire behavioral suite (move, turn, attack, eat, mate, light) is controlled by its neural network “brain”. Each brain’s architecture–it’s neural wiring diagram–is determined from its genetic code, in terms of number, size, and composition of neural clusters (excitatory and inhibitory neurons) and the types of connections between those clusters (connection density and topological mapping). Synaptic efficacy is modulated via Hebbian learning, so, in principle, the organisms have the ability to learn during the course of their lifetimes. The organisms perceive their world through a sense of vision, provided by a computer graphic rendering of the world from each organism’s point of view. The organisms’ physiologies are also encoded genetically, so both brain and body, and thus all components of behavior, evolve over multiple generations. A variety of “species”, with varying individual and group survival strategies have emerged in various simulations, displaying such complex ethological behaviors as swarming/flocking, foraging, and attack avoidance.” ( introduction to PolyWorld: Life in a new context ( link below ))

More information:
Poly’s world
Download source code for PolyWorld

Papers:
Polyworld, Yaeger ( pdf)
Computational Genetics, Physiology, Metabolism, Neural Systems, Vision and Behavior or PolyWorld: Life in a new context ( pdf)
You Tube:
PolyWorld: Google Tech Talks

The Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology claims to have created robots that evolve and learn to communicate with each other.  The robots have a set of genes, flashing lights and there are battery sinks and sources in the environment.  Some robots evolved to tell others where sources and sinks were located.  Some told others sinks were sources while furtively using sources for themselves.

. . .By the 50th generation, the robots had learned to communicate—lighting up, in three out of four colonies, to alert the others when they’d found food or poison. The fourth colony sometimes evolved “cheater” robots instead, which would light up to tell the others that the poison was food, while they themselves rolled over to the food source and chowed down without emitting so much as a blink.

Some robots, though, were veritable heroes. They signaled danger and died to save other robots. “Sometimes,” Floreano says, “you see that in nature—an animal that emits a cry when it sees a predator; it gets eaten, and the others get away—but I never expected to see this in robots.” . . . [ read more Robots evolve and learn how to lie]

So does that mean as operating systems incorporate ai that your computer will start lying to you?

“Of course your credit is not over drawn.  And I have no idea where that order for a memory and hard drive upgrade came from.”

Papers:
Evolution of Adaptive Behaviour in Robots by Means of Darwinian Selection
Evolutionary Conditions for the Emergence of Communication in Robots ( $$$ pdf )
Evolution of neural control structures: some experiments on mobile robots ( ps)
God save the red queen! Competition in co-evolutionary robots ( pdf )
Evolutionary Robots with online self organization and behavioral fitness ( pdf )

More information:
Laboratory of Intelligent Systems
The Evolutionary Robotics Homepage ( extensive list of links )

See also:
Talking Robots Podcast