Cybernetic Zoo

This sort of lore is drilled into the engineering students at LeTourneau University (my alma mater). There's an entire mini museum setup to LeTourneau's achievements on campus. After working there after grad school I realized much of LeTourneau's "genius" was some form of reductionism.

problem: "We need a machine that can grab these logs from these trees we cut down."
solution: "Why not make a gigantic claw and put it on wheels?" https://www.imcdb.org/i236846.jpg

problem: "All these trees are in the way. We just need a way to quickly clear the area."
solution: "Why not just stomp them down?"
'Stomp them down?'
"Yeah" http://cyberneticzoo.com/walking-machines/1964-tree-stomper-robert-g-letourneau-american/

problem: "Ok, RG. Some trees we can't just stomp"
solution: "Ok. Let's just drive over them them." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-9yvNESLPo

There's this saying:
"Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."

RG was never guilty of making anything "barely". Dude straight over over did it on a lot of projects. He took small simple machines and just scaled them tf up. He didn't do small. "You've got a big problem? You just need a bigger machine." is something that fits with what his machinery says about his design choices.

He filled a niche for sure. His style and creations fit at a unique time in American history. American steel and manufacture was very much in it's heyday. He had access to all…

In a different thread there was an argument about the relative futility of some of today's robotics experiments [0]. As it is sometimes typical on HN, the poster with a message outside the "go team" cargo-cult mentality wasn't very welcome. I happen to think he had a very interesting point. And that point translates well into this thread.

Why don't we see practical applications of all of these robotics experiments? The answer is very simple really: Most of them are relatively pointless and add very little to the robotics knowledge-base that will be needed to really move robotics forward into real-world applied robots.

Think of something like robotics vacuum cleaners. Nothing whatsoever innovative about any of them. It's a wheeled platform that has been in use in hobby and research robotics since, well, forever. The '70's and '80's were full of robots with this basic platform. What changed? Electronics got better, batteries smaller, microprocessors more capable, manufacturing more efficient. What was retained and reused from prior research? Probably not much.

I started in college with the goal of becoming a robotics engineer. An EE with specialization in robotics. It didn't take long for me to realize that the field wasn't as interesting and exciting as I made it out to be in my mind. The R2D2's and C3-PO's were nowhere to be found and were easily decades away from becoming reality. If I wanted to be in robotics I would end-up making industrial manipulators…

When I was a wee lad, I would read about robots like this in library books (which I apparently cannot successfully Google.) I remember seeing pictures of this specific one, and others[0]. Robots were kind of a thing in the late 70s and early 80s apparently.

One I've always liked was Westinghouse's Electro[1]. It smoked cigarettes because of course it did, and looked and acted exactly the way you would imagine an old-school sci fi robot would, and even had a primitive (and a bit deceptive) system to respond to "voice commands" [2].

AROK[3,4] was also really cool. That is what a robot is supposed to look like.

That, or a sexy catgirl maid... but I digress.

Certainly not like an anorexic dalek [5,6].

It seems that as technology progresses, design homogenizes. If we do ever get to general purpose humanoid or semihumanoid robots, they'll probably be black rectangles like everything else. I still kind of want the blinkenlights and brushed steel of the future past, though.

[0]https://www.pocket-lint.com/gadgets/news/147374-best-1980s-robots

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuyTRbj8QSA

[2]https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/elektro-the-motoman-had-the-biggest-brain-at-the-1939-worlds-fair

[3]http://cyberneticzoo.com/robots/1975-arok-ben-skora-american/

[4]http://www.theoldrobots.com/arok.html

[5]https://www.badger-technologies.com/

[6]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20183303

Does anybody still have a copy of the file from the MIT-AI Lab PDP-10 called "AI: HUMOR; LOGO TURTLE" or something like that? I haven't been able to find a copy myself, but I remember reading it and have confirmed that it existed, and that it was published in SIGART around 1982.

It was Leigh Klotz's sarcastic response to a Defense Department questionnaire to Terrapin about how their technology could be used to kill people.

He proposed deploying a swarm of thousands of LOGO turtles to crawl around the battlefield in mesmerizing geometric patterns, and stab the enemy with a quick succession of PENUP and PENDOWN commands (proving once again that the pen is mightier than the sword).

Cybernetic Zoo: A history of cybernetic animals and early robots: 1969 – The Logo Turtle – Seymour Papert et al (Sth African/American):

http://cyberneticzoo.com/cyberneticanimals/1969-the-logo-turtle-seymour-papert-marvin-minsky-et-al-american/

Logo's Yellow Turtle: First programmed in 1970. Built at MIT AI Lab:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeFhFPNO8hc

Logo Update, Volume 4, Number 3 - Spring 1996:

http://web.archive.org/web/20120904211432/http://el.media.mit.edu:80/logo-foundation/pubs/logoupdate/v4n3.html

I tried to search for what the acronym "Neo" is based on but no luck. Maybe it's a cinematic reference that got assigned in development and stuck. I don't know.

But it did remind me of my friend Ben Skora and his robot AROK. Fabricated in his garage using sheet metal (Ben rebuilt cars), power window motors, dryer vent pipe for arms, a Richard Nixon halloween mask inside a motorcycle helmet, two car batteries and wheels as shoes, bicycle brake clamps covered with rubber gloves as hands, a front panel of lights that blinked, and miles of wiring that never worked 100%.

The whole system was analog. Tones from two princess phone keypads controlled the motors and he could talk and listen remotely (20 ft away) using a hacked set of walkie-talkies. Don't ask me how.

AROK was built in ~1971-1973 and now resides inside a glass case at the Moraine Valley Community College Technology Building. [1]

He built AROK to help around the house, do chores, walk the dog, etc.

[0] https://cyberneticzoo.com/robots/1975-arok-ben-skora-american/

[1] https://www.morainevalley.edu/news-story/arok-the-robot-rolls-into-moraine-valley/

It was new in that it was computer controlled. General Electric had demonstrated a 4-legged walking truck in 1965.[1] Arms and legs were slaved to the operator's arms and legs. It was very hard to drive. Trying to do that with computer control in 1985 was worth trying.

Building the prototype at full scale, not so much. If they'd gone through a few iterations starting with a dog sized version, it might have worked out better. But there was a political problem. DARPA funded a pony-sized legged walker in the late 1960s[2], and it was publicly shamed as a waste of taxpayer money by Sen. Proxmire. So DARPA went for one big enough to carry a real load.

Early thinking about legged locomotion was all about gait and foot placement. It turns out that balance dominates foot placement, and slip control dominates balance once you get off the flat.

Today, most of the problems have been solved, and there's still no market. Which is disappointing.

[1] https://youtu.be/coNO9FpDb6E

[2] http://cyberneticzoo.com/walking-machines/1968-phony-pony-frank-mcghee-american