Robots, they are mimicking humans more and more. With each passing day, they are becoming a bigger part of our lives by becoming our,
personal family assistant– or by
fighting deadly battles with each other to entertain us. Talking about the amalgamation of artificial intelligence and robotics, the futurists like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have already warned us.
However, in an astounding development, some genius minds lead by the University of Cambridge have created a mother robot that builds its own children robot and mimics the process of evolution and natural selection.
In this amazing video, the robotic arm of mother robot handles a set of five plastic cubes with motors inside. Every single cube has a unique “genome” made by a combination of one to five genes. Thus, this combination and genome gives unique characteristics and attributes needed (shape, motor commands etc) to make the baby robot.
Just the way species and genes mutate in nature- and are combined to adapt to different environments- the mother robot makes her own path of evolution. “Natural selection is basically reproduction, assessment, reproduction, assessment and so on,” said lead researcher Fumiya Iida of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering
in a statement. “That’s essentially what this robot is doing – we can actually watch the improvement and diversification of the species.”
The researchers say these insights collected from these experiments will further help the humans to study their evolution and how natural selection takes place. These robots are actually improving and diversifying themselves, just the way living species reproduce, assess, reproduce and so on.
With each new generation of roots, the mother robot will recognize and maintain the design of the best child and test it to improve the design- making the next set of cube-bots. To explore this mystery, scientists are using robotics and their repetitive tasks can tell us the answers related to evolution.
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