Tropes

R_www.foodproductiondaily.com 2015 00498.txt.txt

#Robots to rebuild themselves and evolve without human intervention In this framework of a odel-free artificial evolutionresearchers have designed what they call a other robotthat can manipulate and create cubic modules improving them as they evolve. he adaptation of physical shapes and structures is a fundamental mechanism which allows biological systems to survive in a large variety of environments, said co-author Luzius Brodbeck. hrough evolutionary adaptation some animals changed their morphologies to live on land instead of under water, and phenotypic plasticity allows plants to adapt their structures for the survival on an ontogenetic time-scale. oday machines, in contrast, are restricted highly to their initial morphological configurations, and it is still a question whether machines can achieve a similar level of adaptability by adjusting their morphologies. he authors of the report are engineers Brodbeck, and Fumiya Iida from the Department of Engineering, Cambridge university in the UK and Simon Hauser of Biorobotics Laboratory, EPFLCOLE Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. The project is in association with the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, Zürich, Switzerland. The aim is to develop robots that can improve by themselves and adapt to their surroundings and new situations. As part of the experiment a other robotautonomously designs and assembles locomotion agents. The locomotion agents are placed automatically in a testing environment and their locomotion behavior is analyzed in the real world. This feedback is used for the design of the next iteration. ach of the constructed candidate agents is assembled from a set of passive and active cubic modules that the mother robot can easily manipulate, added Brodbeck. he mother robot performs a series of handling operations such as pick -and-place or rotation to rearrange the components and physically connect them with hot melt adhesive (HMA). achines are constructed physically and their performance is analyzed without simulation and human intervention to incrementally improve their functionality. hile this model-free approach avoids the reality gap and the selection of infeasible solutions, at least two problems need to be solved. First, given the limited resources in the real world, particularly time, an efficient improvement of functionality must be achieved in a limited number of evolutionary iterations. econd, physical constraints in the automatic construction of variations of machines have to be addressed because conventional automation technologies are designed typically for mass production rather than mass customization, thus the autonomous development of a large morphological diversity still remains to be a considerable challenge. he report concludes extending the model-free phenotype development and optimization could allow machines to autonomously and adaptively modify their mechanical structures together with their control, similar to the animalsfunctions observed in ontogenetic developmental processes. The key for a meaningful design optimization is to build variations of physical machines through the course of the evolutionary process. However, there is only a limited number of mechatronic systems that can physically adapt their morphologies. or the successful artificial evolution of physical systems generating a diverse set of solutions is essential to efficiently explore the design space. This can be challenging, because an open-ended construction process is required, which enables for the fabrication of candidate agents with large morphological variation, said Brodbeck. he demonstrations show the feasibility of the model-free evolution of a physical system. The evaluation of a candidate fitness is done with a physical robot, producing real data in a time-intensive process

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