CULET: a robotic Turing machine

CULET is a robot capable of emulate the behaviour of any 2-symbol Turing machine. It is built with Cubelets extended with Lego bricks [1].

This page contains some examples of Turing machines implemented in CULET, a list of the materials for build CULET, links to the code of the reprogrammed cubes and some photographs of CULET.

Some examples

A machine that emulates the evolution of Rule 110 elementary celular automata. This machine is proved to be universal [Coo04].

A machine that duplicates the number of ones at the beginning of the execution. This machine is described in [Ren16].

List of materials

Cubelets

Lego bricks

Code of the reprogrammed Cubelets

The main program run in the rotator cube. Here is the C++ program for producing the code that must be programmed in this cube. The output depends on the Turing Machine that is going to be implemented: here is the input for producing the ECA rule 110 emulator, and here is the one for the duplicator machine. The C programs produced, respectively, are this and this.

Additionally, the motors and the flashlight needs too custom programs: this is the one of the motors, and this the one of the flashlight.

Some photographs

The idea of this section is to show a closer look of some of the details of CULET.

Previous model

One of the early models of CULET was like this logic gates: the idea was use the flashlights and the distance sensors as cells.

CULET in different mediums

Credits

This work is a collaborative project between the Artificial Life Robotics Lab (ALIROB), at the National Polytechnic Institute, in Mexico, and the Unconventional Computing Lab (UCL), at the University of the West of England.

References

Footnotes

Copyright © 2018 ALIROB