Subject: Re: VR mechanical animation

From: [email-masked] (Lance Norskog)
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 92 14:47:33 PST

The Rod Brooks stuff is very nice for VR critters.  His group in
AI is called "situationist", meaning that their systems react
to situations instead of building an internal model of the
situation and reacting to that.  "The world is it's own best
model."  The result is a system that has limited behavior 
patterns that can appear "intelligent" by doing the right thing 
at the right time. 

In fact, this is how biological systems work.  One kind of
hunting insect/spider/bug has hairs sticking out of its neck.
When the critter turns its head, the hairs touch the head and
the arm extends.  The critter only turns its head when it sees
something, and all it sees is food or enemies.  By the time
the critter knows what it is looking at, its arm is already
out.  Because of nervous system delays, this "external switch"
is the fastest way to react to a food/threat event.  Your 
nervous system works the same way.  If you touch something
hot, your arm moves your hand away and then your brain finds
out what's going on.

The actual computation requirements are very low; he compiles
his high-level Behavior Language stuff down to PALs with lots
of analog stuff feeding them.  No lisp at all :-)  it's a very
refreshing, economical system.  His smallest working robot is
a ~40-pin socket attached to a smaller motor.  It hides in the
dark until there are no noises "for awhile", comes out into the
light, looks for another dark place, and goes there.

Lance Norskog
[email-masked]

>From the MIT AI lab summary:

ROBOTICS

Mobile Robots

Professor Brooks and his staff and students have been building mobile
robots and testing their theories of how to organize intelligence.
They have made progress on a number of fronts: integrating complex
systems into kilogram scale robots, developing simple visual reflexes
for mobile robots, understanding how multiple robots can work together
and producing extremely tiny robots.

During the past year the first prototypes of a new generation of
six-legged robots were demonstrated, incorporating 23 actuators,
150 sensors, and 11 processors in a 2.5 kilogram package.  The
initial programs for this new generation of robots rely on a new
computational model of hormone-like arbitration of behaviors.  A
number of low computation visual reflexes, such as a loom
detector, a person head nodding-or-shaking detector, and a visual
proximity sensor for robots were designed, formally analyzed and
implemented, and demonstrated individually.  A set of 20
identical mobile robots were completed and initial programming
tests were completed as a prelude to studying group interactions
among multiple robots.  A submillimeter thin film piezo-electric
motor built on a silicon substrate using photolithgraphic
techniques was demonstrated spinning, and progress was made in
developing finite element models in order to understand its
behavior.

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From: [email-masked] (Lance Norskog)
Date: Tue, 3 Mar 92 21:03:11 PST

The case I didn't consider is glove-based picking, i.e. real 3D picks.
For this, you need to create a transparent oddly-shaped volume
surrounding the virtual fingers.  Or chopsticks.

Lance Norskog

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From: [email-masked] (Lance Norskog)
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 92 19:28:18 PST

The "too many wires to my body" problem is real.  I would prefer
to listen to "real surround sound" with those infrared headphones;
so a head-tracking system that bolted on to those would be ideal...

Lance Norskog