By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It's an achievement that inspires notions of robots with consciousness and independent minds.
Scientists
said on Thursday they created a brainy, four-legged robot resembling a
starfish that can sense damage to its body and, on its own, think up a
way to recover.
Researchers Hod Lipson and Victor Zykov of
Cornell University and Josh Bongard of the University of Vermont made a
robot that observed its own motion using built-in sensors in its joints
and then generated its own concept of itself, or at least its physical
structure, in its internal computer.
It used this internal model of itself to figure out how to walk on its four legs and eight motorized joints.
"In
the beginning, the robot starts off and does not know what it looks
like. You look at it, and you see that it's a four-legged machine. But
the robot itself doesn't know that. All it knows is that it could be a
snake, it could be a tree, it could have six legs," Lipson said in an
interview.
Lipson said the robot used various movements of its
joints, first to generate hypotheses and then to formulate an accurate
conception of itself.
The researchers then tested the robot's
ability to adapt to new situations -- in this case injury -- by
shortening one of its legs. "The robot knows something's wrong," Lipson
said.
Animals can compensate for injury by changing movements,
like limping to favor an injured leg. Machines can be programmed to
react to a problem in a certain way. But when they are damaged in
unexpected ways, they usually are doomed.
Continued...
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