Spherical, similar to a cell, with a liquid inside that works like a computer and a skin capable of repairing itself and perceiving external pressures as if it were a touch screen. The DNA of the Cogitor robot, which will be developed thanks to three and a half million euros provided by the European Union, has nothing to do with what we have seen so far. It is the first example of a new kind of machine, which goes by the name of “liquid robotics”, capable of probing the depths of the ocean, underground deposits, the ravines of a gravity-free asteroid or at the opposite extreme gaseous planets where the pressure is prohibitive like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Project that will last four years and will be led by the Italian Institute of Technology (Iit) of Genoa, in collaboration with the University of the West of England, the Swiss laboratories of Empa specialized in new materials, Plasmachem of Berlin and Ciaotech , Italian division of the Belgian multinational Pno.
The announcement at the American company’s AI Day
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by Bruno Ruffilli
In short, while Elon Musk announces the humanoid robot Tesla Bot and Boston Dynamics continues to flood Youtube with videos of its artificial androids and dogs performing stunts thanks to skilful editing, here in Europe they have decided to take other paths as well.
“Robots or anthropomorphs require a huge amount of resources,” he comments Alessandro Chiolerio, 41, at the head of the project. “Walking on two legs is very complicated for a machine, like having our manual skills. You need computing power and a lot of energy. Better to draw inspiration from other aspects of nature, according to the task that the robot has to perform “. Proudly from Asti, as he is keen to emphasize, Chiolerio had a past as a researcher at the Polytechnic of Turin before joining the IIT. But he also spent two years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, where they built the rovers, among other things. Here, together with another Italian scientist, Marco Quadrelli, the researcher from the Italian Institute of Technology has developed the first idea of a liquid robot that operates thanks to small amounts of energy produced autonomously by exploiting the temperature differences of the external.
After all, the heart of everything is precisely the liquid, made of molecules that act as passive transistors being able to assume two different states, the equivalent of 0 and 1 of binary systems. Depending on the commands sent by the central processor, they will assume a different configuration inside the sphere to execute them or to always transmit to the processor what they have perceived, it does not matter whether it is the hardness of a surface, its conformation, temperature or other.
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The underlying principle is the holographic brain model theorized by the Viennese neuroscientist Karl Pribram in the nineties. According to him, the information, including memories, would not be recorded by neurons but the result of correlations between different groups of neurons that would give rise to infinite patterns within the brain. This would explain the latter’s ability to store an enormous amount of data in a relatively small space. “Pribram called it ‘holonomy’, a dynamic holography,” concludes Chiolerio. “And this is the basis of the computational liquid, or even computational plasma, of Cogitor”.
Suppose the robot is instructed to move forward. At that point, once the impulse has started from the central processor, the groups of molecules inside the sphere will take on a shape that is equivalent to lines of code containing the instructions necessary to perform the action. Likewise, the data perceived externally will cause other patterns that the processor will interpret. As we said at the beginning, a rather original DNA that brings to mind the T-1000, the advanced robot composed of shape-changing metal Terminator 2.
Now the research group of the IIT and the other institutes involved in the project will have four years to prove the validity of these ideas by building the first working prototype. If they succeed, it could be a revolution in the field of robotics. All starting from a simple cell.
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