By Peter Weiss
To remind themselves how much better their final products could be, robot designers need only look in the mirror. Yet the exquisite biological machines they’ll see there emerge from a blind self-replication process, called evolution, and not from a deliberate design effort. In the latter, an engineer devises a robot for welding metal or baking cookies, for instance.
Betting what works for life may also work for artificial life, researchers in Massachusetts have demonstrated the first robotic system that designs and builds robotic offspring from scratch with minimal human intervention.