By Staff Writer (media@latinospost.com) | First Posted: Aug 14, 2015 07:18 AM EDT

Scientists recently made a mother robot that can build robot children. Furthermore, the robot can also choose the fittest robot babies for survival and re-arrange the remaining ones.

The new creation was published in PLOS One. The researchers led by the University of Cambridge assigned a robot the job of designing a robot that can move using blocks and a motor. There robot mother was tasked to make 10 robot children and determine the distance that these moved within a certain period of time. The fastest robot children were selected, while the slow-moving ones were bound to be re-designed. When the lab experiment concluded, the fastest robots in the group were twice faster compared to the best robots in the first generation. This way, preferential traits are forwarded to the next generation.

“Natural selection is basically reproduction, assessment, reproduction, assessment and so on. That’s essentially what this robot is doing – we can actually watch the improvement and diversification of the species,” said lead researcher Fumiya Iida of the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University said in a press release.

There were five separate experiments conducted, where the mother robot, without any human intervention, designed, built and tested generations consisting of 10 robot babies each. The information acquired from one generation were passed on to the design of the subsequent generation. Each robot child has a unique “genome” consisting of a combination of one to five various genes, containing information about its construction, shape and motor commands. Evolution in the robots happens through mutation, with modifications made to the components of a gene or with single genes being added or removed. A crossover may also occur, where genes from two individuals are merged to form a new genome, based on a report from the University of Cambridge website.

The mother robot was capable of inventing new shapes and gait patterns as well as tweak design parameters based on the information provided by the previous generation. This way, machines can have the ability to evolve and make decisions similar to natural processes.

“One of the big questions in biology is how intelligence came about – we’re using robotics to explore this mystery. We think of robots as performing repetitive tasks, and they’re typically designed for mass production instead of mass customization, but we want to see robots that are capable of innovation and creativity,” Iida stated.

More research groups are also currently developing robots with advanced capabilities.

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