Roboticist: This Is My Job

April 20, 2012 12:00 PM

Matt Bunting Tucson, Ariz. Age: 25 Years on Job: 3

When Matt Bunting was 12, he began building robots?simple rovers driven by remote control. His parents were supportive of his hobby, but one member of the household wasn't so thrilled. "I'd make the rovers chase after my cat," Bunting says. "It would hide, so I had to make a robot to invade its privacy!" His robots became more sophisticated, and when he got to the University of Arizona, he built a hexapod with artificial intelligence. Bunting's professor offered him a job in the Robotics and Neural Systems Lab, where the 25-year-old now creates robots inspired by biology. "I knew that this was what I wanted to do, and now I'm doing it," he says. "It's incredible."

Projects

1. Hexapod

When Bunting built this bot in 2009, it had no programmed knowledge of its own geometry. It used a camera to teach itself how to walk over four days. Now Bunting uses the device for research on machine learning. "I'm exploring behaviors using only the camera?no fancy sensors," he says. In one experiment, Bunting gave the robot a genetic algorithm that mimicked evolution, allowing it to learn how to walk with "this very eerie, natural motion," he says. "And that only took 10 seconds." For another, the hexapod built a 3D map of the surrounding terrain and stepped over obstacles.

2. Cheetah

To construct a robotic cheetah for a DARPA project, Bunting and his colleagues built a pair of pneumatically powered legs with simulated feet and toes. Most robots that run have springs in their feet. But the goal here isn't just speed. "If we wanted to build the fastest land robot, we'd make a wheeled machine," Bunting says. "Our constraint is to learn how biology solved a problem. It's hard to make a fully articulated limb that hits the ground all the time. It wears parts out." In the future, this work will help others make more durable robots and prosthetics.

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