Darwin's robots

摘要

WHAT if a robot - brain, body and all - could be born and then develop in a similar way to a human baby? Instead of a mother, the robot would come out of a printer, in its entirety. "The end game is to evolve robots in simulation, hit print, and watch them walk out of a 3D printer," says Jeffrey Clune, who heads the HyperNEAT project at Cornell University's Creative Machines Lab in Ithaca, New York. Before he can do that, though, Clune needs the right design. His team had already evolved digital brains using neural networks that mimic biological evolutionary processes, and the researchers are now connecting these brains to a body, to find ones that can make the body walk right away.