Sometimes we're too bogged down over making something the best before we can use it. However, the best is often the simplest and sometimes the crudest way of doing something. The following story is adapted from the "Wall Street Journal".
Roboticist Mark Tilden spends his days at Los Alamos building robots out of old Walkman parts, Casio watch innards, discarded tape players and even the sound chips from paper greeting cards. He has a tiny light seeking robot that sweeps windows trying to get maximum sunlight as brushes glued to the robot's feet, do windows, though inefficiently so far.
Tilden has dozens of experimental insect-like mechanical creature including one that lunges to spook his cat when it jumps on Tilden's desk.
Why is the government interested? Tilden is working on a device to clear mine fields. Funded by a U.S. Army grant, Tilden is building a six foot high machine dubbed Bigman made of aluminum scaffolding and walking sticks. Bigman has a magnetic "eye" that zeros in on metal objects.
If Tilden can make this system work, Bigman, produced cheaply and in numbers, will be sent to mine fields to identify explosives and save lives.
KISS: Keep it Simple Stupid
The Wall Street Journal describes Tilden as a "heretic" among roboticists, writing that scientists have long toiled to make the perfect robot: highly intelligent, incredibly sophisticated, capable of "soft logic" akin to human reasoning, for a "gazillion-dollar thinking machine." Tilden finds these devices too complex; too pricey. His creatures have no brains at all: not one microprocessor. He insists robots must 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 in bulk: "Robotics is one of the biggest unfulfilled promises of the 20th century."
We welcome your comments and questions.
© 1996 Developed by Interactive Media Advertising Group, Inc.
