Robognats and roborobins

Originally published 16 July 1990

A car­toon in a recent issue of the jour­nal Sci­ence shows a woman stand­ing aghast in her kitchen as the man from Ace Exter­mi­na­tors releas­es a box full of mice onto the floor.

“They’re nat­ur­al ene­mies of roach­es,” he reas­sures her.

She is not consoled.

I thought of this car­toon when in anoth­er recent issue of Sci­ence I read about the “bug-mak­ers” at the MIT arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence laboratory.

The bugs are robots, and the man behind their cre­ation is Rod­ney Brooks, an Aus­tralian-born arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence researcher who runs the whim­si­cal­ly-named Insect Lab.

While most arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence researchers use mas­sive super-fast com­put­ers to mim­ic human intel­li­gence, Brooks has anoth­er idea: Insects get on very well indeed with very lit­tle brain, so why not build robots mod­eled on the behav­iors of insects? With his grad­u­ate stu­dents, he has been build­ing small, mobile robots that forego com­pli­cat­ed lev­els of cog­ni­tion for some­thing akin to insect instinct.

If noth­ing else, the Insect Lab’s robots are cute and robust. Like real insects, they bump their heads and fall down with­out hurt­ing them­selves. They scur­ry about like roach­es — fol­low­ing base­boards, avoid­ing obsta­cles, look­ing for doors.

Autonomous robots

There is a seri­ous the­o­ret­i­cal side to all of this: Brooks and his group are pio­neer­ing new con­cep­tu­al ways to make machines per­form use­ful func­tions with­out con­tin­u­ous human con­trol. They are also keen on miniaturization.

What’s most impres­sive about the report on the MIT bug-mak­ers is their dream of build­ing robots no big­ger than gnats, whose motors, brains, pho­to­volta­ic pow­er sup­plies, and light sen­sors would all be fab­ri­cat­ed into tiny sil­i­con chips with the same tech­niques now used to make com­put­ers. A key ingre­di­ent, motors so tiny that hun­dreds could fit on the head of a pin, is already avail­able. The sil­i­con-chip micro-motors are not yet pow­er­ful enough to make a micro-robot wig­gle its legs or flap its wings, but the tech­nol­o­gy is evolv­ing fast.

Gnat-sized robots would pre­sum­ably work in swarms, at such tasks as main­tain­ing the clean­li­ness of space tele­scopes and plan­e­tary probes, assist­ing in the man­u­fac­ture of minia­tur­ized prod­ucts, or per­form­ing del­i­cate eye surgery under a sur­geon’s con­trol. Per­haps they will swim into the human blood­stream, break­ing up clots and per­form­ing gen­er­al main­tainance. Rod­ney Brooks and robot sci­en­tist Ani­ta Fly­nn even imag­ine gnat-robots patrolling your gar­den for pests or keep­ing the grass trim blade by blade.

Now it’s this last idea, domes­tic robots, that excites me. At first I thought — ter­rif­ic! I buy a box of one mil­lion micro-robots (let’s call them Robog­nats) pro­grammed for dan­de­lions and release them into the yard. Their tiny light sen­sors are tuned to yel­low. They seek out yel­low flow­ers and nib­ble away at the stalks and roots. Solar-pow­ered, inde­fati­ga­ble, vir­tu­al­ly inde­struc­tible, they work all sum­mer with­out need of food or pay.

But my dream of a weed­less lawn main­tained by Robog­nats soon gave way to doubts. How does one get the robots back in the box at the end of the sea­son? What do mil­lions of idle Robog­nats do when the dan­de­lions are gone? What if a swarm of Robog­nats flits through the hedge and starts devour­ing my neigh­bor’s daffodils?

Better off with dandelions?

Now this is where the car­toon comes in — the car­toon about the roach­es and the mice. Maybe I was bet­ter off with the dan­de­lions than with a mil­lion Robog­nats on the loose, swim­ming in the orange juice at break­fast, nib­bling at my neck under the col­lar of my yel­low shirt (scratch-scratch), stum­bling around con­fused on the bed­sheets at night, their micro­mo­tors whirring, their gnat-sized com­put­er brains run­ning on raw instinct.

So it’s off to the hard­ware store for a can of Robog­nat Spray, an aerosol-borne sludge that will gum up the works of the nui­sance robots.

Or Robog­nat Motels, tiny traps with yel­low doors — they check in but don’t check out.

Or Robog­nat Strips, rolls of yel­low sticky paper, soon cov­ered with thou­sands of writhing robots.

I wnill assume that some­one in the MIT Insect Lab has already reached this lev­el of abstrac­tion and is busi­ly envi­sion­ing the next class of robots, Roborobins, the nat­ur­al ene­mies of Robognats.

Neigh­bor­hoods with a seri­ous Robog­nat prob­lem can order a few hun­dred Roborobins. But will the Roborobins be pro­grammed to fly back to MIT at the end of the sea­son when all the Robog­nats are gone? And if not, will they roost in the neigh­bor­hood trees all win­ter, like star­lings, drip­ping lubri­cant onto the lawn, their ser­vo-mech­a­nisms squeak­ing annoyingly?

Has any­one at MIT’s Insect Lab thought about what we will do then?

---

MIT researcher Rod­ney Brooks lat­er became one of the founders of iRo­bot, the tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny who cre­at­ed the Room­ba house­hold robot. ‑Ed.