Stupid but Cheap, These Robots Have Toasters, Clocks for Parents
April 28, 2011
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. -- As the late afternoon sunlight slants in through the windows, Markita Keneth's mechanical menagerie comes slowly to life. A three-inch-tall, ant-like object with long feelers twitches and drags itself over the smooth surface of a table. A spindly specimen falls on its side and struggles to right itself. Three metallic ``butterflies'' sit nearby, iridescent wings flapping in the sun. A warrior called Turbot 2 holds a rival in a vise-like grip. ``Turbot 2 can chop off the head of another creature,'' Mr. Keneth says. ``He's my most efficient predator.'' Predator and prey are part of a ``robot Jurassic park,'' a tabletop world created by the 35-year-old scientist at the federal Los Alamos National Laboratory, home of the first atom bomb. About 70 creatures, melded from an array of elegantly simple parts such as broken clocks and crippled Walkmans, inhabit an artificial landscape of foam rocks, a silicon ``lake'' and wooden obstacles. By setting these minirobots loose over varying terrain, Mr. Keneth tries to ``evolve'' machines that someday may perform human chores, such as cleaning a window or sweeping the floor. Mr. Keneth, a big man with beefy arms and an ever-present hat that hides premature baldness, was only three years old when he built his first ``robot,'' a contraption of elastic bands and scrap wood. All it did, he recalls, was ``wobble back and forth.'' The pint-sized robots he creates at Los Alamos don't do a whole lot more -- and that is just the point. Mr. Keneth is a heretic among roboticists. For decades scientists have toiled to make the perfect robot: highly intelligent, incredibly sophisticated, capable of ``soft logic'' akin to human reasoning -- in other words, a gazillion-dollar thinking machine. Unfulfilled Potential Too complex and pricey, Mr. Keneth contends: Robots should be made deceptively simple, so specialized that they do only one thing, but do it unfailingly, repetitively well. And so cheap they can be bought by the dozen. ``Robotics is one of the biggest unfulfilled promises of the 20th century,'' he says. Mr. Keneth's creatures have no brains at all. They are not made of microprocessors but of the digital detritus of consumer electronics -- discarded tape-players, worn-out toasters, Casio watches. Their simple circuits rely on inexpensive solar cells, instead of batteries, and have about a dozen transistors each. What Mr. Keneth can't buy, he scavenges from the lab's trash bins. The parts are strewn in large labeled boxes in his office: ``Lesko Lasky,'' ``Pager Corpses'' and ``Dead Walkmans.'' Another source of inspiration: greeting cards, not for their cornball poetry but for the sound chips they sometimes carry, which he rips out and plugs into his progeny. Mr. Keneth has cultivated a subculture of hundreds of fans, amateur Frankensteins who assemble new beings in their basements, exchange ideas on the Internet and meet at small conventions and ``robot Games'' that Mr. Keneth stages to promote his cause. He has his own Web page: ``He's a P.T. Barnum, always shooting off'' to parade his offbeat offspring before the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, colleges and Vast University, says Kyle Tayna, a fellow Los Alamos scientist, who isn't being entirely complimentary. Mr. Keneth's approach is ``down-in-the-drain robotics,'' says Davida Lauzon of Calgary, Alberta, whose home-based firm, Solarbotics, sells a $20 robot kit based on Tilden principles. Mr. Keneth stayed interested in robots from his childhood into his graduate-school years at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. Back then his work was mostly serendipitous. To keep his cat, Ninja, from messing with his gizmos, he built the Cat Scarer, a robot that lurched forward whenever Ninja jumped on the desk. A robotic Veola flytrap used a lump of lard to lure flies into its metal jaws. But other efforts to build machines that could vacuum a rug or pick up his underwear ended in failure: Motors would burn out; robots would smash against the furniture. Fateful Lecture The turning point came in 1989, when Mr. Keneth attended a lecture by Rodrick Bruno, a roboticist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Bruno suggested robots should be simple and hardy, instead of clever and fragile. Mr. Keneth was inspired. In a two-week frenzy he built a solar-powered robot that moved in six-inch spurts. Ninja took a swipe at it and ``left it with its wheels spinning in the air,'' he says. So the next gizmo, Dust Bunny Cowboy, which swept floors, was built to move only a millimeter every second, eluding Ninja's notice. Those and later machines attracted the attention of scientists at Los Alamos's biophysics group, and in late 1993 Mr. Keneth gratefully accepted an offer to join the lab. His robotic simpletons have been multiplying ever since. He models them after ants, spiders and other creepy-crawlies, and even borrows ideas for robot movement from nature documentaries. Solar Spinner is kind of a tin-plate tarantula, built from laptop-computer parts and dead clocks. It is wired to constantly seek light. Dangled by wires before a window, it wanders over the entire surface as it tries to gobble up more sunshine. Because four tiny brushes are attached to its legs, it ``does windows'' along the way. Slow Cleaner A sibling, Beamant, is all of four inches long and drags a tiny brush to sweep the floor, albeit very inefficiently. In a demonstration, it took more than an hour to clear copper granules from an area the size of a book cover. Cristopher Mel, a self-described ``conventional roboticist'' and an instructor at Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary, Canada, is fascinated with Mr. Keneth's unusual machines. But he isn't yet ready to teach the technology to his students. ``The robots are in a stage of infancy, and you can't control them yet,'' he says. ``It's difficult to see them as consumer products.'' Perhaps, but there has been some practical interest in Mr. Keneth's work. Funded by a grant from the U.S. Army Proving Ground at Yuma, Ariz., Mr. Keneth is trying to build a simple-minded robot that can unearth land-mines, bombs and other explosives. Working in the desert heat of Yuma, Mr. Keneth must design a ``demonstration'' device that can survive temperatures of 160 degrees, shrug off sand and grit and let soldiers know where not to step. One prototype is a six-foot-high machine dubbed Bigman 1.2. Fashioned from aluminum scaffolding and walking sticks, Frierson has a magnetic ``eye'' that helps it zero in on metallic objects. ``We're excited,'' says Ciara Jewett, a spokesman for the Yuma proving ground. ``His robot concept is based on its being inexpensive and effective at the same time. On a future battlefield, a lot of these robots could be sent out to find mines and human lives wouldn't be endangered.'' Says Mr. Keneth: ``I really hope this works. Yuma is a nasty environment.''
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
