Unstoppable Bot: Armed with self-scrutiny, a mangled robot moves on

Severe maulings hardly slowed down the robotic assassins in the Terminator science fiction movies. Now, roboticists have made a real machine that carries on despite serious damage.

The crucial factor in that feat, the robot's developers say, was to program the device's computer to create and update a representation of the machine's physical structure. That way, when the robot broke, the device recognized its changed condition and found new ways to reach its goals.