Some mad scientist is injuring robots and calling it research.
Here’s what happens when an otherwise capable, six-legged walking robot loses power to one of its legs and tries to walk without accommodating for its injury:
An here’s what happens when the robot evaluates its injury and adopts a new walking system to use instead. Research!
The latest robo-trend is designing robots that can learn to adapt to challenges that mimics adaptation capabilities of biological animals. This is all being done in an effort to bring robots that much closer to being the super-useful, go-everywhere, do-everything machines we were promised in science fiction. Things rarely go as planned in the real world, so robots need to be prepared.
Today, it’s learning to walk. Tomorrow, it’s taking over the world.
Photo via Peyri Herrera/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
