Abstract
Biological life is in control of its own means of reproduction, which generally
involves complex, autocatalysing chemical reactions. But this autonomy of
design and manufacture has not yet been realized artificially.
Robots are still laboriously designed and constructed by teams of human engineers,
usually at considerable expense. Few robots are available because these costs
must be absorbed through mass production, which is justified only for toys,
weapons and industrial systems such as automatic teller machines. Here we
report the results of a combined computational and experimental approach in
which simple electromechanical systems are evolved through simulations from
basic building blocks (bars, actuators and artificial neurons); the 'fittest'
machines (defined by their locomotive ability) are then fabricated robotically
using rapid manufacturing technology. We thus achieve autonomy of design and
construction using evolution in a 'limited universe' physical
simulation coupled to automatic fabrication.