RoboticsRobots compete in self-destruction
One Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics states that a robot must protect its own existence; a competition was held last weekend which aimed to subvert that law: participants were challenged to build a robot that attempts a simple, menial task but fumbles it or fails, before destroying itself
The Antimov competition in three steps // Source: sparkfun.com
Robots are usually designed to be useful, but an amateur robotics competition last weekend centered on what happened when robotic technologies go wrong.
Organized by SparkFun Electronics in Boulder, Colorado, the Antimov competition aimed to subvert Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, one of which states that a robot must protect its own existence.
Sandrine Ceurstemont writes that instead, the competition challenged people to build a robot that attempts a simple, menial task but fumbles it or fails, before destroying itself.
Participants could either submit their entries as a video, or present their creation live, at an event on 16 October.
The winning video featured a teddy bear birthday party, in which a robot tries to cut a cake, but instead emits a spark that sets fire to itself and its fellow diners — a toy bear and a clown. In another, a robot called Chefbot fails spectacularly to make a crème brülée, by misdirecting its cooking blowtorch.
According to Peter Dokter, one of the organizers, the live entries were just as self-destructive, but because of fire regulations most of them involved mechanical deaths. “One of the participants perched a robot on top of a clothes dryer. It knocked cans of Pringles chips into it, inadvertently fell in, then got completely wrecked by the machine,” he says.
SparkFun hopes to run the competition again next year with more participants. “The design doesn’t need to be complicated, you just need to create something that shows a bit of cleverness,” says Dokter. “There are lots of creative ways to destroy something.”
