The funnest ideas in robotics

My goal with this blog is to find the coolest and funnest ideas in robotics, and to have fun with them. It’s a big job, I don’t know if I’m up to it, but it’ll be fun to try, and I hope it’ll be fun to read. Even better, I hope readers will join in the fun and offer their own contributions in the comments.

If a robot is an intelligent machine, then we are robots, and evolution is a roboticist. Everything we learn in robotics, we can ask whether it might apply to ourselves. Here’s a variation on that idea:

When you walk, run, clean, cook, or whatever, it seems that almost all of the required brain activity is subconscious. (Sometimes roboticists refer to that subconscious stuff as “physical intelligence.” See the Ted talk by Sangbae Kim.) If you, the conscious self, had to figure out what every muscle should be doing, every fraction of a second, you would be in big trouble. Instead, you have an inner robot that takes care of the details, and you are mostly just along for the ride. Your inner robot is like a pet! You can train it, and guide it, but it doesn’t speak English. Be sure to take good care of your pet robot!

If we really want to have fun, we could have a fight: Anthropomorphism versus functionalism! Should robot designers be good engineers and let form follow function? Or should they copy evolution’s design?

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