beware. scientists are creating machines that can evolve on...
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IDEAS & INNOVATIONS
Beware. Scientists are Creating MachinesThat Can Evolve on Their OwnOr to put it a nicer way, researchers have found a way for robots to grow on their own
By Will KnightSmithsonian magazine, December 2013, Subscribe
Teaching a simulated robot to walk is significantly easier if it starts with a simple body plan and grows limbs as it learns. (Source: JoshBongard)
Forget what you see in movies. Most robots sit in a factory somewhere doing dull, repetitive work. Even if theirsoftware does dream of a more interesting job, their physical form remains fixed from the day they’reassembled to the moment they’re junked.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, say pioneers of “evo devo robo”—evolutionary developmental robotics, whichapplies principles of natural selection and biological development to machine design.
Josh Bongard, a computer scientist at the University of Vermont, is designing robots that go through growthspurts. Like anxious teenagers, they experience an awkward period of physical development before they findtheir place in the world.
Bongard’s virtual experiments precisely model robot actions on a computer, beginning with a limbless,wormlike machine with several body segments. It has one goal: Make progress across a flat surface toward alight source. But instead of giving the robot a complete set of instructions, Bongard generates a wholepopulation of bots and lets evolution do the work.
Each virtual robot moves randomly—for instance, one segment might move an inch to the left and anothermight bend 90 degrees. While most of the bots flail hopelessly, a few, by chance, nudge forward. The stepsbehind all the little advances are stored and combined in a process that mimics the mixing of genes in living,reproducing beings. Then, at some point, Bongard steps in and gives the successful robots legs. And evolutioncontinues.
Bongard has found that he can evolve a contraption that walks upright in just 100 generations. By contrast, acontraption that starts with legs already formed takes 250 generations. “It makes sense to stay close to theground when you’re young,” he says, “and only gradually grow legs and stand upright, which makes you moreunstable.”
A robot that can grow would be highly useful. Imagine a spacecraft landing on an alien world growing anextra pair of legs when it encounters treacherous terrain. Or a search and rescue bot that morphs from stockyto slender to navigate a tight crevice. But will such a machine ever be more than a computer simulation? “It’sthe last manufacturing step that has always haunted roboticists,” says Hod Lipson, who directs Cornell
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University’s Creative Machines Lab. “You can design crazy robots, but in the end you have to make them.”
Lipson’s work might help. He has used a 3-D printer to churn out robot components and has demonstrated amachine capable of assembling copies of itself with premade components. Those feats suggest it might bepossible to design a bot that manufactures itself—that is, evolves a body plan and builds it.
For now, Bongard wants others to join the experiments. In August he made his virtual robots available online.He calls them ludobots, ludo from the Latin play. “Primates are evolved to recognize a limp in anotheranimal,” he says. “We would like to crowd-source robotics,” so people can build machines, observe how theymove and fix flaws.
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