Ruby Fresson
ROBOTS have come a long way in the century since Czech writer Karel Čapek used the word to describe artificial automata. Once largely confined to factories, they are now found everywhere from the military and medicine to education and underground rescue. People have created robots that can make art, plant trees, ride skateboards and explore the ocean’s depths. There seems no end to the variety of tasks we can design a machine to do.
But what if we don’t know exactly what our robot needs to be capable of? We might want it to clean up a nuclear accident where it is unsafe to send humans, explore an unmapped asteroid or terraform a distant planet, for example. We could simply design it to meet any challenges we think it might face and then keep our fingers crossed. There is a better alternative, though: take a lesson from evolution and create robots that can adapt to their environment. It sounds far-fetched, but that is exactly what my colleagues and I are working on in a project called Autonomous Robot Evolution (ARE).
We aren’t there yet, but we have already created robots that can “mate” and “reproduce” to generate new designs that are built autonomously. What’s more, using the evolutionary mechanisms of variation and survival of the fittest, over generations, these robots can optimise their design. If successful, this would be a way to produce robots that can adapt to difficult, dynamic environments without direct human oversight. It is a project with huge potential – but not without major challenges and ethical implications.
The notion of using evolutionary principles to…
