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December 10, 2007

It's not 'I, Robot,' but Robot U at Bryant

Journal photo / Bill Murphy

Kate Thomas, 20, of Bedford, N.H., a student in the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics course at Bryant University, checks on her creation, this morning. The students used Matlab and robotic
hardware to create the robots, which perform tasks such as search and rescue, playing tag, vacuuming and cooking without remote control.

SMITHFIELD -- The robots took over today at Bryant University.

Well, not exactly. But the contraptions put together by Prof. Brian Blais’s students did capture attention while strutting their stuff in the rotunda of the school’s Unistructure.

Blais, whose field is science and technology, said one of the objects of the exercise was to demonstrate artificial intelligence, or AI in robotics parlance. His students assembled 10 robotic examples, all created from Legos, the children's engineering kit.

While robots have been employed for decades in such fields as assembly-line manufacturing, there was a time even before the harnessing of electricity when people watched in awe as a mechanical device apparently performed a complex task flawlessly.

One of the wonders of the 18th-century Western world was The Turk, a chess-playing automaton that mowed down nearly all challengers. When opponents made their move, the beturbaned gizmo would whir and reach out a metal hand to move its chess pieces.
In those days, when chess claimed more of the public’s imagination than today, the device was regarded practically as another Wonder of the World.

Alas, no great robotic frontier had been crossed. The Turk sat at one end of a cabinet, on which reposed a chessboard. Inside the cabinet, cunningly concealed, crouched a very small but very expert chess player, who could observe the chessboard through a narrow slit. He operated various controls to trounce the patzers who had forked over coins for the experience.

Today’s demonstration was literally centuries removed from that swindle. The devices were powered by rechargeable batteries, for example.

Blais said no remote controls were permitted. The robots had to figure out tasks by themselves.

-- Journal staff writer Thomas J. Morgan

Posted by Mike McKinney  at 5:30 PM | Permalink

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