14 DAY TRIAL // Robots which sing, dance, supervise the house and children are nothing new and they have already started to be considered trusty companions. But now that Cornell University from the United States succeeded in creating a robot that can replicate all by itself, do we have any reasons of concern?
The sole purpose of the robot designed by the Americans is to prove that it can "reproduce", but this robot can also create new ones able to individually replicate. This type of mechanism could prove useful for different tasks in the cosmic space or in any other environment dangerous to humans.
The robots are built from a series of modular cubes, each of them containing the same mechanism and running the same replicating program. On the exterior part of the cube there are electromagnets, which allow them to selectively attach and detach one from another. A complete robot consists of a sequence of interconnected cubes whose design allows them to bend, move or reconfigure by rearranging or adding new components. Each such cube is diagonally sectioned so that the robot achieves a relative movement freedom.
To begin the reproduction process, the robot bends down so that the cube placed at the top of the column becomes the base of the new robot. In the next stage, the robot bends laterally on each side to attach new cubes which will be placed on top of the first. The process repeats, and the newly developed robot can start building a new one. A robot cannot build a taller one; hence each of them creates an exact replica of itself.