#robotic evolution

[snargl-com]

Endangered Androidocadauruses from Outer Space

Their skin could be incredibly sensitive, allowing them to feel even minor temperature changes, air currents, or textures. This heightened tactile sense would aid in exploration and interaction…

[rubeo]

Droids met the challenge of perceiving their self-image and reflecting on their own thoughts as part an effort to develop robots that are more adaptable in unpredictable situations

Robots might one day trace the origin of their consciousness to recent experiments aimed at instilling them with the ability to reflect on their own thinking.

Although granting machines self-awareness might seem more like the stuff of science fiction than science, there are solid practical reasons for doing so, explains roboticist Hod Lipson at Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Laboratory.

So, Lipson and his colleagues developed a robot shaped like a four-legged starfishwhose brain, or controller, developed a model of what its body was like. The researchers started the droid off with an idea of what motors and other parts it had, but not how they were arranged, and gave it a directive to move. By trial and error, receiving feedback from its sensors with each motion, the machine used repeated simulations to figure out how its body was put together and evolved an ungainly but effective form of movement all on its own. Then "we removed a leg," and over time the robot's self-image changed and learned how to move without it, Lipson says.

"This could lead to a way to identify dangerous situations, learning from them without having to physically go through them—that's something that's been missing in robotics," says computer scientist Josh Bongard at the University of Vermont, a past collaborator of Lipson's who did not take part in this study.

Beyond robots that think about what they are thinking, Lipson and his colleagues are also exploring if robots can model what others are thinking, a property that psychologists call "theory of mind". For instance, the team had one robot observe another wheeling about in an erratic spiraling manner toward a light. Over time, the observer could predict the other's movements well enough to know where to lay a "trap" for it on the ground. "It's basically mind reading," Lipson says.

"Our holy grail is to give machines the same kind of self-awareness capabilities that humans have," Lipson says. "This research might also shed new light on the very difficult topic of our self-awareness from a new angle—how it works, why and how it developed."

...then they will be developed into weapons for combat, then the movie Terminator will become reality. awesome.