Building synthetic brains capable of human level discovery and invention...

Summary - Creativity Machines built from STANNOs form the basis of robotic control systems that may rapidly learn all of their behaviors from scratch. In other words, our robots do not require that computer programs be written by human beings. Given very broad goals, such as the objective of moving forward, the robot learns to walk from the lessons of its own self-generated experiments. The autonomous development of other robotic skills proceed in the same general way, such as in finding a pre-specified target within the robot's environment. Essentially, the robot experiments with a number of self-conceived approaches to the problem, cumulatively learning from its successes and failures to attain its goals.

Details - In the two movies shown here, the first (left/top) is of an 18 degree of freedom  hexapod crawler controlled by a STANNO-based Creativity Machine after just 1 minute of cumulative training. The robot utilizes its onboard sonar to calculate its progress toward a wall located at the top of the frame. Note that the robot's body has been deliberately constrained to move in one dimension to avoid misleading sonar returns. The tether trailing behind the robot and containing the serial cable to a PC, has been festooned to avoid torques from it. At this stage of training, after 1 minute of its self-experimentation, the robot slowly and tentatively flails about, making very little forward progress.

In the right/bottom movie, the robot has been experimenting and learning from its successes and failures for 4 minutes. In contrast to its walking skill after 1 minute, it has begun to develop efficient forward walking skills. Using similar procedures, the robot is able to self-invent backward, left turn, right turn, left shuffle, and right shuffle strategies.

Having developed this fundamental walking behavior something even more amazing occurs:  In response to repositioning the robot's intended target, it is able to spontaneously improvise appropriate gaits to pursue its goal. Below, for instance, in the upper left frame, the robot is using its previously perfected gait to crawl forward (click image to play). With humans feigning target sonar returns from behind the robot, the hexapod immediately devises a backward gait, even though it has not been programmed to do so. In similar fashion, we convince the crawler that it must pursue an objective forward and to the right. Appropriately, it spontaneously invents the necessary complex behavior to implement a right turn. Then, again, convincing the robot's inventive control system that its target is to the side, it improvises the necessary crab-like motion to give chase.

Of course, the sequences displayed on this page were just the beginning of IEI's Creative Robots program, mere proof-of-principle experiments conducted between 1997 and 2004. Shortly thereafter, the same self-bootstrapping, creative control algorithms were embedded in extremely sophisticated hardware, beginning with a constellation of military satellites, autonomously docking space vehicles, and off-world exploration robots. ...In the years to come, you will hear more about what has been going on behind the scenes with the most sophisticated robotic AI paradigms ever invented!