Lonelybuilder performing autonomous construction

Lonelybuilder, a marxbot with a magnetic manipulator performing autonomous construction.

At the beginning of the experiment, the robot knows neither the geometry nor the topology of the environment. It does not know where the resources are located. The robot does know that building a tower requires three resources, and that a remote resource can be fetched by building a bridge. In the video, the decision to build this specific bridge to fetch the remote resources was the robot's own one, done by reasoning using an HTN planner, whose source code is available at http://gitorious.org/planner9 .

More informations about this work are available in my PhD thesis at http://stephane.magnenat.net/publications/Software%20integration%20in%20mobil... .

A video explaining the rotating scanner hardware and the lightslam algorithm is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMkRRX7Oxc8 .

More information about the Mobots group are available on its web site at http://mobots.epfl.ch .

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• robot
• mobile robot
• autonomous
• construction
• miniature
• integration
• machine intelligence
• scalability
• event-based architecture
• slam
• symbol grounding
• htn planning
• autonomous construction
• scarce resources
• design methodology
• marxbot
• mobots
• epfl
• lonelybuilder
• aseba

[almightyzentaco]

He seems so damn lonely.

[zitiwalksaw]

WALL-E!!

[TuccoBenedicto]

This Is very impressive. Is the robot able to access the integrity of the bridge and potentially able to correct its mistake if she deems it unsafe to pass?If the block were to fall awkwardly would it try to re position, or assume it had fallen correctly? If you had different shaped/sized objects, would she be able to decide on the ideal size/shape or trial and error or just pure random choice?

[aguyfrommars1]

:( lonely robot. It needs to make a task to get out. Oh and by the way dont give it guns. We have all seen terminator.

[SvenOkonomi]

This is wildly impressive robotics. A robot that finds its own solution. Indonesian call centers beware!

[lolmaomgoml]

you should have programed it to cheer every time it succeeds at a task it wishes to complete :D

[luigi14444]

thumbs up if u fast forward it because x4 real time was too slow for you

[saucy05]

next he is going to be like "i need to inslave a human being, to oil my motors regularly".

[junior17medval]

I always wondered how project wall-e began.

[p0wer5000]

havn't you people seen battle star galactica!! -.- AI robots=bad

[Charles45354]

Robot: I must invest my first two cubes to build the bridge, so I can access the three other cubes :-)

Me: Very goo- wait... Did you just think a smile?! He's learning emotions! OMG someone kill it!!!!

Robot: :-(

[haunclesam]

Really cool; and adorably cute