Humans are always busy with their own life, their own journey, or in other words their own adventure. I think it’s in our genes to explore and to look for new interesting experiences. So that’s why for this assignment I came up with a human element of adventure or exploration, which in my humble opinion is one of the key elements of life.
So if we then look for exploratory/adventurous robots we quickly come across the more autonomous kind of robots being used in research, there is even a whole subfield in AI and Robotics on this. But while they are highly advanced and programmed to have a big portion of autonomy, for me this is not the creature I am looking for. But nevertheless, they are interesting to learn more about this human element.
“RHex is a bio-inspired, hexapedal robot designed for locomotion in rough terrain. It can drive over rocks, mud, sand, snow, and railroad tracks. You can throw any obstacle in front of it: RHex doesn't care.”
Rhex shows the possibility of a robot overcoming all kinds of obstacles, this truly autonomous self-surviving robot show more of the adventurous kind of human aspects. While this robot is mainly developed for research of military usage. It’s a cool example of how creatures can be autonomous and exploratory.
Djedi is a creature which is developed by a team of scientist to visit places in the Egyptian pyramids where the researcher are not able to visit yet. By driving through narrow passages it’s able to investigate undiscovered parts of the pyramids. This is highly exciting, but it’s still a controlled creature that is not really exploring all by itself.
On a whole other spectrum, we find the well-known Roomba, a friend of all busy households. Which cleans the room while you are away. Interestingly enough I thought about Roomba because of its explorative behavior while cleaning the room, while it might not be as technical advanced as his bigger brother Rhex it’s still quite interesting to see an autonomous creature move across the room. And if you look with a more anthropomorphic view, it’s a quite cute creature.
Lastly, there is another robot that is mostly focused on education and kids but does show high levels of exploratory behavior. It does ask for a lot of attention as well, but that might even work better for the showing of its ‘behaviors'
Talking about anthropomorphic cute creatures... even though it’s a fictive creature it does show more about the possible behavior of exploratary creatures namely my good old friend: Wall-E. This creature might not possess real qualities but the emotions which it can trigger is highly inspirational.