It isnt every day you get to break ground like this.

Point Cloud Kinematics

Since I was a child, I've read sci-fi and followed the pursuits of others as they attempted to bring robots to reality. All that time, ingenious people have thrown everything they had at making a robot stand, and balance on a foot so it can take a step. It took advances in hardware to do it, MEMS gyros and pressure sensors, faster processors and motors, and some horrendous trigonometric calculations coupled with programmed and learned responses.

All these systems are mechanical and reactive, and where it's necessary to calculate the physics required to do something, its based around a unit of the mechanism - a servo or actuator, a sensor value, a known length of lever, a known weight. Some advanced systems compute trajectory and use a predictive model of the forces involved, but again they are all based on individual parts.

To compute the centre of gravity of a simple regular object like a cylinder mathematically isnt hard, a complex one with manifolds is harder, and a compound one is damn near impossible unless you are a serious mathematician. I've never considered myself a mathematician, but I've managed to solve a mathematical riddle thats been p*ing off robot builders for decades, and with a simple equation based on a philosophy of mine.

I hold that the universe isnt real per se. The atoms we can measure and assure ourselves of their reality practically dont exist when viewed at their level, they are nearly all space, and what isnt is made of bits too small to actually exist on their own, so it kind of begs the question for me about whether they are there at all and not just a figment of my perception. Well old Descartes also said, I think, therefore I am, and I know I'm here, so...

It gave me the idea that the atoms themselves dont matter, they are universally identical and we even replace them within ourselves with others (Is that what alive is then, the process of reorganisation? Hmmm...) like oxygen, so it's the arrangement of them that makes something what it is, and not the atoms themselves. Information is stored by the atom's position relative to others, like the positions of atoms in DNA that make me look like me, and not like someone else.

So, I realised then that the robot, viewed as atoms, would be easily calculable. To keep the numbers down, as atoms are so many, I made them 1mm cubes, and calculated mass from the surface of the robot using the width and height of the polygons, times the depth to get volume, and the density to give mass at any point of the robot.

At this point, I realised that averaging atoms together to make virtual bigger ones eventually extrapolated into the polygons themselves, and the point-field created by them had mass that I could compute the centre of balance from by density. This calculation turned out to be so bloody simple it took a while to notice what I'd done with it, because not only does it ignore the angles of the parts of a mechanism, it cuts right across all complexity as if it isnt even there.

You still need hideous trigonometry to calculate the skin of the robot, that model is a mathematical formula with integrals 15 levels deep, 16 if you count the photographically rendered surface I'm working on, to turn a ballet of mathematics into a perceptual model for my AI...

I love that the image dancing away there exists only in my mind, and as an equation with parameters that define what shape it is when you see it, it isnt real - and yet, because its built the same way as a real thing is, it behaves like the real thing does.

For me, this is evidence that you dont need atoms to be real, but you do need something. We just happen to have atoms around here...