Full Text: Oy, Robot!

And what is the NASA funding for? To develop robot technology to the point where we can send robots to the Moon and Mars to prepare habitats for humans before they arrive, to assist humans while they are living on the surface, and to take care of the facilities once the humans have left. The robots will be the permanent residents of the planets and the humans will be transient visitors. So for the other planets of our solar system the robots will indeed have taken them over.

Now perhaps we might want to debate the speed of developments in the future, and how "cognitive" these robots may be.

Lund: Certainly, we have to agree on which planet we are talking about. My inclination is to make robotic applications to solve problems for our population on this planet. There are plenty of problems in the daily life of many people on this planet where robotic spin-off application can help in the same way as the computer spin-offs are influencing our daily life as you mention them. I am thinking of the huge potential in cognitive rehabilitation, physical rehabilitation, fighting obesity, surgical robotics, releasing creative potential amongst people in developing countries, entertainment and services in general. I think that there are so many potentials for the spin-off applications from the robotic research and development that may help a lot of people in their daily life that we as expert roboticists have a responsibility to help this development on its way.

But of course there is huge potential in utilizing robotics for space exploration. I think that it poses an interesting challenge on robotics in what kind of robotics is necessary and suitable for the different kinds of space explorations, and how cognitive these robots could/should be. There are many different views on this issue. I believe that it is crucial to use a thorough understanding of the relationship between the body and the brain (between the hardware and software control). For space exploration, we can imagine that physical reconfiguration (change of the body) may play even a larger role than control adaptivity (change of the brain) - we would probably like to pack robotic artifacts as much as possible for the launch and then allow the robots to unpack themselves (physically reconfigure) at the place where they are to perform their mission. This demands flexibility of the physical body of the robot. Such flexibility can be obtained with modular robots for self-reconfiguration such as our ATRON modules. A robot may be composed of e.g. 100 such ATRON modules that each contains processing, communication to neighbours, mobility on each other, etc - a bit like cells that can attract each other, perform cell migration, cell death, etc. A robot composed of such modules can change its own physical form to physically adapt to the different tasks that are to be performed. But this could even be used here on our planet, e.g. for rescue work under collapsed buildings after earthquakes. When using this kind of robot for the rescue work, the robot may drive to the disaster area, transform itself to a crawler to proceed over rough terrain, and if it finds a hole in the piles of bricks it may transform itself into a snake to wind into the hole and possibly find air holes under the collapsed buildings where it may transform itself into columns to sustain the building until survivors can be rescued.

I believe that understanding the role of the body is crucial for the scientific understanding of intelligence and for future robot applications, as explained above. Also biomimetic robotics often shows that the right morphology may allow a much simpler control than originally hypothesized in pure behavioral biological work. For instance, we showed how the right ears morphology of female crickets may allow the cricket to have a much simpler neural control for obtaining phonotaxis behaviour before the mating act than was originally hypothesised - because there was an exact match between the three 'B's: the body, the brain, and the behaviour.

So, in order to understand intelligence and cognition, we need to look also at the contribution of the body, and robotics may provide an excellent scientific testing ground for building such an understanding. Or what do you think? Can intelligence be understood in isolation from the body?

Brooks: As you know my whole robotics career has been based on the idea that the role of the body is crucial for understanding both animal/human intelligence and for designing robots. I have experimented with self-reconfiguring modules, originally for MITI (Japan) in the early nineties to develop robots that could crawl through 8mm holes into nuclear reactor vessels then reconfigure themselves in order to carry out inspection and maintenance. The limiting factor in all such approaches to date has been the physical strength of the joints, and practical robots have had to rely on large macrostructures, on the order of the size of the robot, to give it adequate strength. We see however that biological systems do not have this same limitation, but neither are they built out of small modules that require strong bonds. Rather they are built out of systems that rely on "tensegrity," or tensional integrity. Tensional forces build structures that are both strong and arbitrarily bigger than their largest rigid components. I think that this might be the way forward for building robots out of smaller units.