Scientists said Thursday they created a brainy, four-legged robot resembling a starfish that can sense damage to its body and, on its own, think up a way to recover.
Scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE) have designed a robot that does not require batteries or electricity to power itself. Instead, it generates energy by catching and eating houseflies.
Researchers at the University of the West of England, Bristol, are working on creating autonomous robots that power themselves using substances found in the environment. Professors Chris Melhuish and John Greenman plan to give robots their very own guts -- artificial digestive systems and the corresponding metabolisms that will allow robots to digest food.
British scientists are developing a robot that will generate its own power by eating flies. The idea is to produce electricity by catching flies and digesting them in special fuel cells that will break down sugar in the insects' skeletons and release electrons that will drive an electric current.
To address the risks that self-designing machines could quickly become unable to communicate with people, researchers have designed a visual interface that would give autonomous machines the equivalent of body language.
A useful self-replicating machine could be less complex than a Pentium IV chip, according to a new study performed by General Dynamics for NASA.
Researchers are developing a prototype of the world's first fully autonomous robot. The 'SlugBot' will be hunt down slugs, over 100 an hour, and use their rotting bodies to generate electricity.
When a future robotic race writes its Book of Genesis, it will surely give a place of honor to Hod Lipson and Jordan B. Pollack who have designed and built the first robot that can design and build other robots. (In earlier efforts, replicating machines had been simulated only on computers and on special integrated circuits.)
Scientists in the burgeoning field of artificial life have reached a major milestone, creating a computerized system that automatically creates, evolves, improves and finally builds a variety of simple mobile creatures without any significant human intervention.
Hod Lipson and Jordan Pollack, of Brandeis University in Massachusetts,US, have developed a computer system that uses natural selection to design and automatically build robots. "We carefully minimised human intervention in both the design and fabrication stages," said Professor Pollack in the journal Nature