Robot trunk learns motor skills like a baby

• Autores: Paul Marks
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2960, 2014, pág. 23
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Marks talks about Festo's bionic elephant's trunk. Intelligent systems engineer Jochen Steil and his colleague Matthias Rolf used a process called "goal babbling," thought to mimic the way a baby learns to grab things by continually reaching--a process of trial and error that lets them work out which muscles they need to move. Similarly, the robot remembers what happens to the trunk's position when tiny changes are made to the pressure in the thin pneumatic tubes feeding the artificial muscles. This creates a map that relates the trunk's precise position to the pressures in each tube. The trunk can now be manually forced into a series of positions and learn to adopt them on command--in other words it can now be trained to repeat actions and pluck anything from light bulbs to hazelnuts.