If I asked to make a good robot for throwing a block, you can think of a human object, with stable legs and working hands. And who is to blame? If people do good at everything, they lose things.
There’s a chance of zero instead of focusing on what’s in the video, Frankenstein’s beast on what looks like pieces of Tetris. It is because the computer “transformed” the body of the robot and the brain that run on a new platform from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It is called Evolution Gym, instead of relying on architects, as well as their love of humans, tomorrow’s robots may rely on their own ingenuity. “There is the potential for new, unexpected robots, and even the most efficient robots,” says computer scientist MIT Wojciech Matusik, founder of the machine. “When you start from the most important things, how much intelligence can you make?”
More, as it were. Above you will see a soft robot who learned to bend. Each “Voxel” with a variety of robots has a purpose. Black means a solid piece, and gray means a soft piece, which does not do anything quickly. Instead, color voxels are founders, or fragments of any robot that releases motion. (In a fixed-angle robot, these are the engines that strengthen its bones.) Blue means the connector pulls or raises in a straight line, while orange means it acts horizontally. So when you see the robot shaking, it just looks at the black voxel in the center, while the black machine pushes it down.
This, in contrast, is a simple arch-shaped robot made of horizontal voxels. It’s the legs, really. But when it comes to collaboration and growing in harmony, voxels make the machine move with amazing grace – like speed, really.
Here is one who learned to climb. Note the blue actuators on both sides of the base, which rotate their movement to buy the top while the appendage type on the soft robot sounds up. Another problem is that the component parts are soft, so the machine has to adjust to fit as they climb. This is a very difficult characteristic of a simple robot like this, especially one that is self-made.