14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers at the University of Cambridge managed to create a "mother robot" that builds its own baby robots.
However, it doesn't just build its own baby robots but it actually improves on its previous designs to build faster and better machines. During the development process, the researchers wanted to test the "mother" robot on how it will study and improve on its own designs, and on what principles it will develop its own natural selection "senses."
To do that, the scientists had the "momma" robot build 10 pint-size machines in one generation with a motor and one to five plastic cubes. Afterwards, the "mother" robot was left to observe how fast they moved around the board in front of her. Based on the distance they travelled, "she" would then assess which were remaining behind and which were going forward faster.
In order to fix this sort of inequality, the "momma" robot tried to improve the slower ones, introducing mutation and crossover in the slower robo-kids for the next generation. When a series of repairs were completed, the last batch of small machines moved twice as fast as the fastest little robots that were manufactured first.
This way, the Cambridge University researchers wanted to study and improve the creativity of robots through natural selection. What's impressive is that, although the robot "mom" built its sons using a pre-defined design software, when planning to improve its offspring, it created better designs ultimately, and it took 10 minutes to build them.
