A team of US-based engineers, funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and DARPA, has begun the development of a MacGyverbot — a robot that, like the tenacious TV hero MacGyver, can interact with its environment in novel ways to solve problems.

As it currently stands, robots are incredibly proficient at tasks they are specifically built and programmed to perform — such as whizzing around Amazon’s huge fulfillment depots — but utterly useless at everything else. One production line robot can debone 500 pork ham thighs per hour — but you’d probably end up with serious internal bleeding if you gave it a toothbrush and instructed it to clean your teeth.

Ultimately, robots are just highly advanced, specific tools; you wouldn’t use a hammer to grate some cheese, and you wouldn’t use a robot to perform a task that it wasn’t designed for. Until now. If Mike Stilman — the project’s leader (pictured right), based at the Georgia Institute of Technology — has his way, we might soon have general purpose robots that can perform a variety of tasks, depending on their surroundings.

“Our goal is to develop a robot that behaves like MacGyver, the television character from the 1980s who solved complex problems and escaped dangerous situations by using everyday objects and materials he found at hand,” says Stilman. “We want to understand the basic cognitive processes that allow humans to take advantage of arbitrary objects in their environments as tools. We will achieve this by designing algorithms for robots that make tasks that are impossible for a robot alone possible for a robot with tools.”

In essence, the team will build a highly maneuverable robot that has human-like arms and hands, and imbue it with an artificial intelligence that can analyze its surroundings to find potential tools. While current robots use computer vision to maneuver its way around obstacles (such as Google’s self-driving car), the MacGyverbot will also look for objects that can be used to remove or otherwise circumvent obstacles. If no clear path is available, MacGyverbot might pick up a chair or ladder and then use that to scale an obstacle. If a door is locked shut, the robot might look for a key — or another implement that would allow it to force the door open.

They key to this approach is to create software that can identify every discrete object surrounding the robot, and then somehow work out their mechanical properties. It needs to be able to look at a chair and know that it’s a chair — but it also needs to know what material the chair is made from. Will it hold the robot’s weight? Is it a wooden or steel chair? (Important, if the robot finds itself in a burning house).

Stilman won’t be starting from scratch on the software: Pat Langley and Dongkyu Choi will be helping out, and they bring Icarus with them. Icarus, which is funded by DARPA, the ONR, and the National Science Foundation, is a unified theory that tries to model the human cognitive architecture. In short, Icarus is an attempt to model — in software — how the human brain solves problems. For the MacGyverbot project, Langley and Choi will update and expand Icarus’ functionality.

Ultimately, as Stilman’s work is being funded by an Office of Naval Research grant, and Icarus is connected to DARPA, the MacGyverbot is likely to see quite a few burning buildings — both during rescue missions, and during actual combat. If laser-guided bombs can’t put an end to terrorism, then maybe what we need is an army of MacGyvers. After all, if you can create a robot soldier that is as tenacious as a human warfighter… why run the risk of putting squishy fleshbags on the front line?

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