Robot Evolution (shades of our recent discussions...)

Structure Forever Evolving
Pollack and colleague Hod Lipson merged automatic manufacturing techniques with evolutionary computing. Their results appear Thursday in the journal Nature.
     The computer that evolved the designs was told only what parts it would be working with, the physics of the environment in which its offspring would be moving, and the goal of locomotion.
     Over several days, the computer thought up different designs and methods of movement, creating traits that worked and failed. Like dinosaurs, woolly mammoths and dodo birds, the failures were cast into the dustbin of history.
     The most promising designs survived and passed their success to future generations. Hundreds of generations later, three robots were manufactured by a prototyping machine.
     “It evolved various kinds of locomotive mechanisms — all surprising, given there was no human coming up with how to do it,” Pollack said. “We got ratcheting motions. We got rolling motions. We got swimming motions.”

Robot Reproduction
The little white robots were made of bars, actuators, ball joints, motors and circuits. People intervened only to insert the motors into the plastic parts spit out by the prototyping machine.
     The next step will be to incorporate sensors into the robots so that success or failure in the physical world can be built into future generations.
     It could be a difficult project, said Maja J. Mataric, a professor at the University of Southern California and director of the USC Robotics Research Labs.
     “The authors very cleverly figured out a way to design a body and then actually manufacture it, which is an amazing feat,” she said. “What is not at all clear is how to come up with a sensor design and manufacture it.”

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