Mother Robot Creates Robots of Its Own

Evolution and natural selection did the rest and it worked, as it has for us DNA-based species. A mother bot (a big robotic arm) designed, built, and tested “generations” of ten “kids”: tiny, cube-shaped bots.

According to Dr Fumiya Iida of Cambridge University, who led the research with colleagues at ETH University in Zurich, one aim is to gain new insights into how living things evolve.

What this means is that this robot is able to build new robots that are better than its predecessors, essentially evolving itself in the process to become what it deems to be the ideal robot. During five experiments, the mother robot was permitted to build her own children until she reached 10 generations.

Terrifying, isn’t it? Actually, the objective of the study isn’t to create self-replicating robots, but rather to develop automated systems that can learn, improve and adapt to new situations. The last generation of children could perform tasks twice as quickly as the first, according to the results posted in the journal PLOS One. Each child was tested on how far it could travel from one point to another in a given amount of time to determine which one was the fittest. Each of the robot’s genomes consisted of up to five different “genes”, containing all the information about the physical properties and computational abilities of that robot. The most successful individuals remained unchanged from generation to generation, while the least successful were subjected to mutations and gene crossovers.

The origin of intelligence is a mystery to many biologists, and a question that Iida and his team were interested in exploring. “We think of robots as performing repetitive tasks, and they’re typically designed for mass production instead of mass customisation, but we want to see roots that are capable of innovation and creativity”.

Evolutionary robotics is a growing field which allows for the creation of autonomous robots without human intervention.

But machines are not adaptable in the same way.

The mother robot then selects the best baby robot and refines its design in the same way the evolution works in real nature. These smart little blue cubes don’t look likely to mount a challenge to mankind any time soon, but do indicate how robots, when left to their own devices, may be better at crafting machines than we are in the not too distant future. “But what we do have are a lot of enabling technologies that will help us import some aspects of biology to the engineering world”.