Robot builds its own children, mimics evolution
A mother robot built her own robot children, improving them with each successive generation all with virtually no human intervention.
Mull that over for a minute.
The robotics breakthrough, reported this week in the open access journal PLOS One , happened when researchers at University of Cambridge programmed a specially equipped Universal Robots UR5 robotic arm and gripper to not only build a robot capable of movement, but to use information gleaned from the performance of the mother robot's first children to progressively more successful ones.
This act of building better and better robots based on the best traits of the original is, the researchers claim, a form of evolution.
In a release on the project, lead researcher Dr. Fumiya Iida of Cambridges Department of Engineering, who worked in collaboration with researchers at ETH Zurich, explained, Natural selection is basically reproduction, assessment, reproduction, assessment and so on. Thats essentially what this robot is doing we can actually watch the improvement and diversification of the species.
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