A Platform for Robotics Research Based on the Remote-Brained Robot Approach

Robots of the future will act in the real world. To realize robots with the common sense to do this will, it is generally believed, require massively parallel processing. This is a problem for those of us who want to do experiments with robots in the real world today—it is hard to build active, limber, situated robots when they have to carry along heavy brains. Our answer is “remote-brained robots.” A remote-brained robot is designed to have the brain and body separate, both conceptually and physically. It allows us to tie artificial intelligence (AI) with massive parallelism directly to the real world, enabling the verification of high-level AI techniques, which could previously only be used in simulation. Once the brain is placed remotely from the body, it encourages us to investigate many important research topics of embodied agents working in the real world. This paper describes such platform for future robotics and principal experiments done on the platform.