Chapter 11 3.1 Pleasing machines with bodies

When Mark Pollin shakes your hand, you're actually shaking his toes.He blew his finger off a few years ago while fiddling with a homemade rocket.Surgeons managed to piece together a hand from his toes, but the handicap still left him sluggish. Pauline builds machines that cannibalize one's own species.His inventions are often complex and huge. The smallest robot is bigger than an adult; the largest robot can be as tall as a two-story building with its neck stretched out.Armed with piston-driven jaws and steam-shovel-like arms, his robots ooze with life. To keep his monsters from falling apart, Pauline often had to fiddle with screws with his crippled hand, much to his inconvenience.To speed up repairs, he installed a top-of-the-line industrial lathe outside his bedroom door and stocked his kitchen with welding equipment.Now it only takes a minute or two to weld the pneumatic limbs of his steel behemoths.But his own wounded hand was still tormenting.He wanted to take a hand off the robot and put it on himself.

Pauline lived in a warehouse at the end of a street in San Francisco.That street is a cul-de-sac under the highway viaduct.The side of the residence is full of simple tin sheds with signboards for auto repair.Outside the warehouse is a scrap yard, which is full of rusty and scrapped machines, as high as the outer wall of the iron fence, and there is even a jet engine among them.The junkyard is usually eerie and empty.The postman who came to deliver the letter to Pauline always turned off the engine and locked the door when he jumped out of the SUV. Pauline described himself as a juvenile delinquent in his early years, and grew up to do some "creative Vandal-style street smashing".Even in San Francisco, a place full of personalities, everyone admits that his level of mischief is not ordinary.As a 10-year-old, he used a stolen acetylene gun to cut up large jars of chewing-gum machines. In his 20s, he took up street art, remaking outdoor billboards—ingeniously spray-painting them into political messages in the dead of night.Recently, he made another news: His ex-girlfriend reported to the police that he took advantage of his weekend away to paint her car with epoxy adhesive, and then covered the body, windshield and other places with feathers.

Pauline's contraption was both the most ingenious and the most biological of machines.Take a look at this "rotary sharp mouth machine": two iron rings covered with shark-like sharp teeth rotate crazily on intersecting tracks, forming an angle with each other, and "chewing and chewing" again and again.It can chew up a small object in an instant.Normally it would be nibbling on another robot's dangling arm.Let's look at the arch worm again.A car engine is installed at one end of this improved agricultural tool, and the crank drives 6 sets of extra-large rakes, which move forward arch by arch when raking the ground.The way it squirms is very inefficient, but biological.There is also a "one-step-one-peck machine", whose fuselage is equipped with canned pressurized carbon dioxide, which drives its steel head in a pneumatic way to beat the ground and smash the asphalt on the road.It is like a giant 500-pound woodpecker pecking at the road like crazy. "Most of my machines are unique in the world. Other sane people would not build these machines that have no practical use for human beings." Pauline said without a smile.

A few times a year, Pauline puts on a show with his family's machines. The debut show in 1979 was called "Machines Make Love".On the show floor, his weird machines stepped on each other, tore and crushed each other, and finally turned into a pile of rubbish without distinguishing between you and me.A few years later he held a show called "Useless Mechanical Behavior," which continued his style of rescuing machines and returning them to their primitive form.So far, he’s given 40 or so shows, usually in Europe—“because there,” he says, “no one will sue me.” The Art Mafia) also embraced such daring performances.

In 1991, Pauline staged a mechanical circus show in downtown San Francisco.That night, in an abandoned parking lot under a highway overpass, thousands of punk fans in black leather jackets gathered purely by word of mouth.In this makeshift arena, under a blinding spotlight, a dozen mecha monsters and iron-pumped gladiators wait to take out each other with passion and brute force. The size and spirit of these iron guys conjure up an image: mechanical dinosaurs without skin.They are balanced by hydraulic hose-driven skeletons, hinged gears, and cable-connected moment arms.Pauline calls them "organic machines."

This isn't a lifeless dinosaur in a museum.Their body parts were "smuggled" by Pauline from other machines, and their power came from old car engines.They seemed to be infused with life, crushing, writhing, jumping, and crashing under the beams of the searchlights—alive! That night, under the strong metal light, the audience who left their seats went wild. Big speakers (chosen for harsh sound quality) kept playing pre-recorded industrial noise.Occasionally, the cacophony cuts to radio talk shows or other background noises of the electronic age.A sharp siren drowned out all the cacophony—the show has begun, and the robot fighters are moving!

For the next hour it was a scuffle.A two-foot-long drill took a bite out of the long neck of a massive brontosaurus-like creature.This drill is shaped like a bee's stinger and reminds you eerily of a dentist's drill.It then furiously slid into another robot. "嗞-嗞-嗞-", hearing it made people's teeth tingle.Another frenzied creature—the "corkscrew"—was comically dashing around, hissing and tearing apart the pavement.It was a 10-foot-long, one-ton steel block, with two steel spiral-tread wheels at the bottom, each wheel driving a corkscrew 1.5 feet in diameter to spin wildly.It's adorable as it scuttles around at 30 mph on asphalt.The top of the locomotive is equipped with a catapult device, which can project a 50-pound blasting flame bomb.When the "drill" was chasing and stinging the "corkscrew", the "corkscrew" was throwing flame bombs at a tower made of pianos.

"It's bordering on controlled anarchy here," Pauline once joked to his voluntary followers.He jokingly called his "company" Survival Research Laboratories (SRL), a deliberate misnomer for a company.The Survival Research Lab puts on shows and likes to do it without official permission, without reporting to the municipal fire department, without insurance, without prior publicity.They seat the audience so close together that it looks dangerous—and dangerous. A converted commercial lawn sprinkler - which is supposed to crawl through the grass, water it, and bring it to life - is bringing an unholy bath of fire to the place.Its spiral arms pump out a swirl of ignited kerosene, forming fiery orange-red clouds.The choking fumes of incomplete combustion were forced back by the highway overhead, suffocating the audience.During the gladiatorial fight, "Gorkel" accidentally kicked over the fuel tank of "Hell Shower", forcing it to end its mission. The "flamethrower" immediately ignited to fill the gap. A "flamethrower" is a giant steerable blower, commonly used to air-condition downtown skyscrapers.It was hitched to a Mark truck engine.The engine drives huge fans that pump diesel fuel into the air from 55-gallon drums.The carbon arc spark ignited the mixture of oil and gas, and spit out a 50-foot-long bright yellow flame, baking the tower built by 20 pianos.

Pauline can control the dragon with a wireless remote controller for model airplanes.He turns the nozzle of the "flamethrower" on the audience, who scramble out of the way.The heat could be felt even from 50 feet away. "You see how it works," Pauline said later, "without predators, the ecological chain is unstable. These audiences have no natural enemies in their lives, so let these machines be predators. Their job is to drop predators on civilization." The machines in the Survival Research Lab are complex and getting more and more violent.Pauline is always busy hatching new types of machines to keep the circus' ecosystem evolving.He often upgrades older models with newer limbs.He might replace Corkscrew's chainsaw with a pair of large iron claws like a lobster, or he might weld a flamethrower to the arm of the 25-foot-tall "Big Tuatta."Sometimes he does crossbreeding, swapping the parts of two big guys.The rest of the time he was busy delivering new gadgets.At a recent show, he unveiled four new pets: a portable lightning machine that spews nine feet of crackling blue lightning at nearby robot warriors; Sirens; a military electromagnetic railgun that shoots hot molten iron lumps at 200 miles per hour, comet-like fireballs burst in the air and fall in burning drizzle; and an advanced long-range visual human-machine integration For the cannon, the operator wearing a virtual sight can adjust the aiming direction of the muzzle by turning his head to stare at the target, and the shell is a beer can filled with detonator explosives and concrete.

Since these performances are "art", they will inevitably be short of funds: ticket sales can only cover the miscellaneous expenses of a performance-fuel, food for staff, and spare parts.Pauline confessed that some of the prototype machines he used to disassemble into new monsters were stolen.A member of the Survival Research Lab said that they are happy to keep performing in Europe because there are many "things to ask for".What is a "desireable thing"? "Easily available, easy to salvage, or something that costs nothing." Other raw materials were culled from military surplus components.Pauline bought them truckloads from downsized military bases for $65 a pound.He also scavenged machine tools, submarine parts, outlandish motors, rare electronic components, crude steel, and even $100,000 worth of spare parts. "Ten years ago these things were worth a lot of money. They were a matter of national security. And all of a sudden they're useless crap. I'm retrofitting them and I'm actually rehabilitating these machines — what they used to do is' Valuable 'destructive work' now doing useless destruction."

A few years ago, Pauline made a crab-shaped robotic creature that scurried across the floor.A panicked baby guinea pig is locked in a tiny cockpit full of switches to act as the pilot.Being such a bio-machine is not intended to be cruel.The idea is to explore the possibility of the convergence of organisms and machines.Survival Research Lab inventions often combine high-speed heavy metal objects with soft biological organisms.After starting up, the little guinea pig bio-machine wobbled and dashed left and right.In a show full of chaos and controlled anarchy, it's hardly noticeable."This robotic creature is pretty much unmanipulable and useless, but that's the level of control we need," Pauline said. At the opening of the new MoMA in San Francisco, organizers invited Pauline to gather his family of machines in a downtown vacant lot to "create the illusion for a few minutes in broad daylight."His "Shockwave Cannon" is the first to appear on the scene and fires empty cannons.You can even see the air shock wave emanating from the muzzle.Car glass and building windows shuddered for several blocks, and traffic was temporarily disrupted during rush hour.Then "The Swarm of Bees" made its grand debut.These are waist-high cylindrical mobile robots.They are in groups, running around.Where the swarm is going is anyone's guess; no one swarm controls the rest; the other swarms don't care where the swarm goes.The square became the domain of these hard-boiled fellows—a bunch of runaway machines. The ultimate goal of Survival Research Labs is to make machines autonomous. "It's really hard to get them to behave autonomously," Pauline told me.Still, he is ahead of many well-funded university labs in research that seeks to transfer control from humans to machines.His swarm-like creations, which cost a few hundred dollars, are assembled from recycled infrared sensors and scrapped stepper motors.He beat MIT's robotics lab in the dark battle to create autonomous swarming robots. In the conflict between what is conceived by nature and what is made by machinery, Mark Pollin is undoubtedly a supporter of the latter.He said: "The machines have something to say to us. Whenever I start to design a new show, I ask myself, what are these machines trying to do? For example, this old excavator makes me seem to see someone. A country boy drove it every day, digging trenches for the telephone company in the hot sun. The old backhoe was tired of this life, and his back was sore and dusty. We found him and asked him what he wanted to do. Maybe he wanted to Join us in the show. We're running around like this, rescuing machines that have been abandoned or even dismembered. We have to ask ourselves, what are these machines trying to do, what color are they trying to be painted? So, we Consider the coordination of colors and lighting. Our shows are not for people, they are for machines. We are never concerned with how the machines please us. We are concerned with how to please them. This is our show - for A show by a machine." Machines also need entertainment.They have their own complexities and have their own lives to live.By making more complex machines, we are giving them autonomous behaviour, so that they will inevitably have a purpose of their own. “These machines are free in the world we’ve created for them,” Pauline told me. “They behave very naturally.” I asked Pauline, "If machines behave according to the way of nature, do they also have natural rights?" "The big ones have many rights," said Pauline, "and I have learned to respect them. When one of them When a big guy comes towards you, he has the right to walk and you have to let him out of the way. That's how I respect them." The problem today is that we don't respect our robots.They are stacked in windowless factories, doing jobs no one wants to do.We use machines like slaves when they shouldn't be.Mathematician Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in artificial intelligence research, once expressed this opinion to those who will listen.He is a tireless advocate of downloading the intelligence of the human brain into a computer.And Douglas Ingerbart, the wonder boy who invented word processing technology, the mouse, and hypermedia, advocated the idea that computers should serve people.In the 1950s, the two masters met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and left behind a well-known dialogue: Minsky: We want to give machines intelligence and let them have self-awareness! Ingelbart: You want to do so many good things for the machine?So what are you going to do for humanity? It's a story often told by engineers working to make computer interfaces friendlier, more human, and more human-centered.But I stick to Minsky's idea-to stand on the side of the creation.Human beings have their own way of survival.We'll train machines to serve us.So, what are we going to do with the machine? Today, the total number of industrial robots in the world is close to 1 million.However, no one but that crazy bad boy artist in San Francisco asks what a robot wants.People thought it was ridiculous, inappropriate, even disrespectful. It is true that 99% of the millions of "autonomous devices" have only earned the name of the arm.They are intelligent arms that can do everything an arm can do and are tireless.Still, the "robots" we've hoped for are still blind and dumb, and fed from wall sockets. With the exception of Mark Pollin's out-of-control robots, most of today's muscular automatons are cumbersome, sluggish, and live on handouts—reliant on a constant supply of electricity and the harness of human brain power.It's hard to imagine anything interesting coming out of these guys.Add another arm, legs, or a head, and you've got a lethargic behemoth. What we wanted was the robot called Robbie, the prototype robot in science fiction—a robot that was really free, alone, self-sufficient in energy, a robot that would scare people away. Recently, some lab researchers have realized that the most efficient way to make Roby is to unplug static robots and create "moving robots."If the power block and brain can be fully accommodated in the arm of a static robot, then maybe it is so-so.In fact, as long as any robot can walk independently and survive independently, it will go to the next level.Although Pauline is somewhat cynical and sentimental, his robots have repeatedly defeated those developed by the world's top universities.And the equipment he used was exactly what those universities had rejected.A deep understanding of metal's own limitations and degrees of freedom compensates for Pauline's lack of a degree.He never used blueprints when making those organic machines.Once, in order to tease a pursuing reporter, Pauline took him around his studio to rummage through the "plans" for the running machine he was developing.The two wrestled for 20 minutes (“I remember the drawings were here last month”) before finally finding a piece of paper beneath a yellowing phone book from 1984 in the bottom drawer of a dilapidated metal desk. .A machine sketched in pencil on paper is really just a sketch without any technical description. "It's all in my head. I just draw a line on the metal block and I'm ready to cut it," Pauline tells me, holding up a finely turned two-inch-thick piece of aluminum.The block of aluminum slightly reveals the shape of a T. rex forelimb bone.There are two other finished pieces exactly like it on the workbench.He's working on a fourth.These aluminum blocks will one day be attached to the body of a running machine the size of a mule, as part of its limbs. Pauline's running machine doesn't really run.It just walked faster, with occasional staggers.No one has yet made a robot that can actually run.A few years ago, Pauline built a very complex quadruped walking machine, 12 feet tall, boxy, neither smart nor agile, but it did shuffle slowly.The four thick square columns are its four legs, which are jointly driven by a huge transmission and messy hydraulic pipes.Like other Survival Research Lab inventions, this lumbering monster is operated by a remote control from a model car.In other words, the monster was a 2,000-pound dinosaur with a brain the size of a pea. Despite tens of millions of dollars invested in research and development, no computer whiz has yet managed to spin a machine that moves across a room with its own intelligence.Some of the robots either dawdled for days, bumped headlong into furniture, or broke down just three-quarters of the way through. In December 1990, after 10 years of hard work, graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University's "Field Robotics Center" finally assembled a robot and named it "Randerer".It slowly traversed the entire yard for about 100 feet. The "Wanderer" is bigger than Pauline's shuffling giant. It was originally developed for the investigation of distant planets.But Carnegie-Mellon's behemoth cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars even at the prototype stage, while Pauline's shuffling monster cost only a few hundred dollars, two-thirds of which bought beer and pizza.The 19-foot-tall iron Mr. Rambler weighs two tons, not counting the weight of his brain resting on the ground.The gigantic machine toddles around the yard, each step being deliberate.Other than that it does nothing else.After waiting so long, being able to walk without getting tripped up is enough to give people a sense of relief. Rambler's parents applauded with satisfaction for its first step in life. Moving its six crab-like legs is the easiest thing for the Rambler, but trying to figure out where you are is too difficult for the giant.Even simply delineating the terrain so that you can calculate the path of action has become a nightmare for the "Wanderer".It is not afraid to walk, but spends a lot of time thinking about the layout of the yard. "This must be a yard," it said to itself, "here are some paths I could take. But I'll have to compare them with the map of the yard in my mind and choose the best one." "Walk "Papers" usually create a mental outline of their environment and then navigate themselves based on this outline; the outline is updated with each step they take.The programs in the central computer that manage the Rambler's laser imagers, sensors, pneumatic legs, gearboxes and electric motors are thousands of lines long.Despite weighing two tons and being as tall as a two-story building, the poor creature lives on only its head.And this head is connected to it with a long cable. Let's take the little ant under a big foot pad of "Walker" for comparison. When the "walker" walked from one end of the yard to the other with great difficulty, the ants had already run back and forth.The weight of an ant is only 1/100th of a gram including its head and body—it’s only about the size of a grain of rice.It has neither an impression of the entire courtyard nor where it is.Yet it can navigate the yard without even thinking about it. The R&D personnel made the "Rover" thick and large to withstand the extreme cold and sandy environment on Mars, where it would not be so heavy.Ironically, however, due to the size of the "Rover", it is impossible to go to Mars in this life anyway; only a robot as small as an ant has hope. Ant-like mobile robots are the solution that was envisioned by Rodney Brooks.The MIT professor decided it would be better to create thousands of useful idiots than to waste time producing one useless genius.He points out that while sending an overweight dinosaur with a vaunted intelligence on a planet might be far-fetched, sending a swarm of mechanical cockroaches capable of doing things might give us more information. Brooks published a paper in 1989 titled "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System."The paper was later widely cited.In it he claims that "it is possible within a few years to invade an exoplanet with millions of low-cost small robots." He proposes to use a disposable rocket to send a swarm of solar-powered bulldozers the size of a shoebox to invade the moon.Send an army of insignificant, limited-capacity individual robots, make them work together on missions, and allow them to act freely.Some soldiers will die, most will continue to work and eventually make some achievements.This army of mobile robots can be assembled in two years from off-the-shelf parts, and then launched on the cheapest single-way rocket around the moon.While everyone else was arguing about some big dude, Brooks could have built and dispatched the invasion army. NASA officials have reason to heed Brooks' bold plans.The effect of remote control from Earth is less than satisfactory.A robot teetering on the edge of a chasm waits a minute for a command from a ground station.Therefore, robots must achieve autonomy.An aerospace robot cannot be in space with its head on the earth like the "Rover".It must carry its own brain with it, and operate entirely on internal logic and rules without too much communication with the earth.Their minds don't have to be very bright.To clear a landing field on the surface of Mars, for example, a mobile robot could spend 12 hours of dumb work every day scraping an area.Push, push, push, keep the ground level!Taken alone, any one of them may not do a very good job, but when hundreds of robots are working in groups, they can do a good job of clearing a building foundation.Later, when human expeditions land, astronauts can give the still-living mobile robots a break and pat them on the head appreciatively. The vast majority of mobile robots die within months of landing.Day after day of extreme cold and heat can cause computer chips to crack and fail.But like ant colonies, individual mobile robots are trivial.They are thousands of times cheaper to launch into space than the Rover; so hundreds of small robots can be launched for a fraction of the cost of one large robot. Brooks's wild idea has now evolved into a formal NASA project. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are creating a tiny rover.The project started out as an attempt to create a miniature model of a "real" planetary rovers.But when people gradually realized the advantages of small size and distribution, microrovers became a real achievement in their own right.NASA's microrobot prototype looks glamorous: walking on six wheels, radio-controlled, like a kid's beach buggy.In a sense it is indeed an ATV, but it is also solar-powered and self-guiding.A large number of these tiny rovers could be the protagonists of the Mars Environmental Survey mission, scheduled to launch in 1997. Micro-robots can be built quickly from off-the-shelf parts.It's cheap to launch them, and once released in swarms, they're out of control without constant (in fact, perhaps misguided) management.This crude but practical logic completely subverts the slow, deliberate, quest-for-full-control approach adopted by most industrial designers to design complex machinery.This deviant engineering philosophy boils down to a single slogan: fast, cheap, out of control.Engineers foresee that robots following this path will be applicable in the following fields: (1) planetary exploration; (2) gathering, mining, harvesting; (3) remote construction.