상황에 맞게 적응하는 '소라게' 로봇 [MIT] VIDEO:MIT’s HERMIT Crab Robots Can Do Anything You Shell Them To
MIT’s HERMIT Crab Robots Can Do Anything You Shell Them To
Inspired by the shell-swapping hermit crab, MIT’s HERMITS use interchangeable mechanical shells to do all sorts of creative things
By Evan Ackerman
로봇은 다른 일을 할 것이라는 큰 기대 없이 하나의 특정한 일을 위해 설계되었을 때 가장 잘한다. 새로운 전문가용 로봇을 갖고 싶을 때마다 로봇처럼 다른 것을 하고 싶다면, 이것을 추천하고 싶다. 로봇을 만드는 것은 어렵지만, 그보다 덜 어려운 것은 다른 분야의 전문가에 쉽게 적응할 수 있도록 하는 것이다. 우리 인간은 도구를 사용할 때 항상 그렇게 한다
과거에 우리가 로봇을 이용한 도구에 대해 쓴 적이 있지만, MIT 미디어 연구소의 로봇학자들은 자랑스럽고 고귀한 소라게에서 영감을 얻어 고도로 전문화된 로봇으로 쉽게 전환할 수 있는 로봇을 디자인했다. 단순히 영리하고 맞춤형으로 만든 기계조개껍데기를 바꾸거나 빼내거나 다시 만들 수 있다.
MIT의 HERMITS는 작은 로봇 정육면체와 기계적인 껍질을 결합한다.
HERMITS는 확장성이 뛰어난 로봇 모듈식 인터랙티브 토이오 셸(#backronym)을 의미하지는 않지만 소니의 작은 토이오 로봇에 기반을 두고 있다. 우리는 몇 년 전에 Toio에 대해 썼다. 그것들은 적외선 패턴을 기반으로 위치추적을 할 수 있는 이륜 로봇 정육면체였다. 그들은 중앙집중식 컨트롤러를 통해 서로 그리고 다른 물체들과 상호작용할 수 있다.
황기철 콘페이퍼 에디터
Ki Chul Hwang Conpaper editor
Robots are well known to be specialists, doing best when they’re designed for one very specific task without much of an expectation that they’ll do anything else. This is fine, as long as you’re OK with getting a new specialist robot every time you want something different done robotically. Making generalist robots is hard, but what’s less hard is enabling a generalist to easily adapt into different kinds of specialists, which we humans do all the time when we use tools.
While we’ve written about tool using robots in the past, roboticists at the MIT Media Lab have taken inspiration from the proud and noble hermit crab to design a robot that’s able to effortlessly transition from a total generalist to highly specialized and back again, simply by switching in and out of clever, custom made mechanical shells.
HERMITS, which almost certainly does not stand for Highly Extendable Robotic Modular Interactive Toio Shells, even though I’m going to pretend that it does (#backronym), are based around Sony’s little Toio robots. We wrote about Toio a few years ago—they’re two-wheeled robotic cubes that can localize themselves based on infrared patterns in a special mat that they zip around on, allowing them to interact with each other and with other objects through a centralized controller. Toios are designed to be modified, but mostly just as toys, which apparently doesn’t take them anywhere close to their full potential.
Ken Nakagaki, a roboticist at the MIT Media Lab, made a minor modification to the Toio robots by adding a little servo motor that can poke a pin up out of the robot’s top. It’s just a small change, but it enables all kinds of new things, since it allows the robots to drive inside of custom shells and dock with them, just like a hermit crab. But unlike any hermit crab I’ve ever seen, these shells can be endowed with clever mechanical transmission systems that leverage the robots’ motors to give them highly specialized capabilities on-demand.
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