This 'Mother Robot' Can Create Baby Robots That Can Evolve Over Generations

Imagine a robot that can build other robots. Now imagine a "mother" robot that can test each of its "children" to see which ones perform the best at certain tasks. That's exactly what researchers have created.

"Natural selection is basically reproduction, assessment, reproduction, assessment, and so on," said Fumiya Iiada, who helped create the new robot, in an interview with The Daily Mail. "That's essentially what this robot is doing-we can actually watch the improvement and diversification of the species."

With each robot "child," there's a unique "genome" made up of a combination of between one and five different genes, which contain all of the information and the baby robots' shape, construction, and motor commands.

The new robot itself actually consists of an articulated arm and grasping mechanism. It can put together various plastic cubes, each with a motor inside. When the motors are activated, the baby robots move around with varying efficiency depending on their configuration.

"One of the big questions in biology is how intelligence came about-we're using robotics to explore this mystery," said Iida in an interview with the Telegraph. "We think of robots as performing repetitive tasks, and they're typically designed for mass production instead of mass customization, but we want to see robots that are capable of innovation and creativity. It's still a long way to go before we'll have robots that look, act and think like us. But what we do have are a lot of enabling technologies that will help us import some aspects of biology to the engineering world."

The findings are published in the journal PLOS One.

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