Building Languages for Self Rebuilding Robots
summary
Modular ATRON modules are spherical robots with an 8-bit microcontroller with 4KB RAM and 128KB ROM, neighbor-to-neighbor IR comms, hooks and batteries; a reversible spatial DSL compiles to a tiny VM/C code and uses idempotent messages and local state merge to tolerate one-way links. The distributed program runs at ~10 Hz, lets a car shape reconfigure to a snake, yields ~30× robustness improvement and succeeds about five of six tries, but IR misalignment and occasional module lockups remain.
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chapters (19)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:41A: The robot building kit (*)
- 6:00Robot building kit?
- 7:15Resilient & Adaptable
- 9:13Programmable matter
- 10:52This talk: ATRON robot programming (before taking it to Mars)
- 12:44Robotics programming
- 17:17Domain-specific languages
- 22:59First language prototype: Everything's an object?
- 24:35#2: Roles for shapes, functions for functionality?
- 26:59Roles for functionality!
- 29:33#4: The insight: One program distributed across the robot
- 34:12#4 (details): Properties [1/2], Robustness and efficiency
- 35:00#4 (details): Properties (2/2) Program reversibility
- 38:12Industrial robots
- 40:46DSL for Reversible Assembly Sequences
- 41:35Agricultural robots
- 42:44Unmanned Aerial Systems (i.e., flying robots aka drones)
- 44:26Lightweight energy efficient robots
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