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posted by janrinok on Friday July 24 2015, @12:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the this-might-not-end-well dept.

In a paper published last month in PLOS ONE, Luzius Brodbeck, Simon Hauser, and Fumiya Iida from the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich took things one step further by teaching a "mother robot" to autonomously build children robots out of component parts to see how well they move, doing all of the hard work of robot evolution without any simulation compromises at all.

The basic idea behind evolutionary robotics is to build a whole bunch of simple robots, test them in some way, and then take a few of the most promising robots and use them to inform the design of the following generation. This is generally how biology evolution works (survival of the fittest and whatnot), and the fact that you're sitting there reading this is a testament to how successful it can be. For those of us who don't have eons to wait, robots can be forcibly evolved much much faster, as long as you're willing to focus on just one trait and keep things extremely basic.

The robots have begun to build themselves. Yup, we're pooched.


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  • (Score: 2) by arslan on Friday July 24 2015, @04:09AM

    by arslan (3462) on Friday July 24 2015, @04:09AM (#213005)

    Keep calm... we can co-exist unless they've figure out how to use us as a power source... oh wait we figured that one out for them already... oh yea, we're screwed.

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