Thursday, May 5, 2011

Robots Learn to Share and Help Each Other



Robots have officially learned how to help each other--like animals and humans do--in a laboratory evolution experiment.

The evolving robots measured no more than an inch in length and carted around on wheels in an environment where they foraged for "food" disks. The disks could either be brought to locations scoring them points. When all the disks were placed, the round--or generation--would move on to the next and only the survivors who amassed enough resources, could pass on their “genes” (code).

Creators of the experiment Dario Floreano, EPFL robotics professor, and Laurent Keller, University of Lausanne biologist, found that in each round the robots would share their food; ensuring that the pool of robot “genes” in the next generation would remain large.

That might seem like a small feat but these robots were not programed to share food. They learned to share food on their own, as Hamilton’s Rule states that organism evolve to do good for the continuation of their species over it’s own need for self-preservation.

This is a great day in robotics now that they can help each other. Wait…help each other…as a species…uh, we’ll get back to you.

19 comments:

  1. This is unbelievable technology. It reminds me of a video I saw on TED where they have the warehouse robots working together.

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  2. at the rate robots have been getting more advanced, i can't tell if i should look forward to the technological advances, or be worried about skynet.

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  3. it's "tit for tat" man.

    any entity can see the benefit of working cooperatively, as long as the parties continue to interact.

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  4. First we got ball catching robots, now we got teamwork robots. Who cares about taking over the world, they are going to take over sports.

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  5. new evolution can start now :)

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  6. this is unbelievable, we're getting close to singularity.

    by the way i wanted to congratulate you for your blog, the posts are always interesting :)

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  7. Man this is awesome, I love how technology is exponentially improving!

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  8. Terminator will be real soon :)

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  9. That's crazy, wonder where they'll be in next 10 or 5 years

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  10. Well... Sounds like I need to get my anti terminator bunker ready.

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  11. I see robots being able to kick and dunk in the near future now. Interesting video, thanks for sharing!

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  12. This is so awesome. I can't wait until I can have a robot army to hang out with.

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  13. nice blog, I'm following you bro.

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