[Newspoetry] We're Screwed

[Joe Futrelle]

Let's hope they're friendly robots.

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Study Says Robotic System Can Make Other Robots

August 30, 2000
Filed at 2:45 p.m. ET

By Reuters



LONDON (Reuters) - Cheaply produced robots that can perform mundane
chores may be a step closer thanks to American scientists who have
made a robotic system that can for the first time design and
construct other robots. 

The system operates with almost no human intervention. 

``The
robotic system is creating little toy robots completely
automatically. All the humans are doing is snapping in the
motors,'' explained Jordan Pollack, a computer science professor at
Brandeis University in Massachusetts. 

The tiny plastic prototype robots look like toys but they could
represent the future of affordable robotics. 

``This is, I think, a harbinger of a new industry where dumb robots
for specific tasks like vacuuming or clean-up or assembly can be
automatically designed and manufactured without human engineers and
high-cost machining,'' Pollack said in a telephone interview. 

``So the robots are cheap enough to be useful and practical.


``The robotic system spits out 8X8X12 inch (20X20X32 cm) maximum
pieces of plastic that look like toys but are fully functional
robots that move around,'' said Pollack. 

The research, which is reported in the science journal Nature,
works on both the body and the brain of the robot. 

It takes computer software, the brains, and incorporates it into
the hardware, or body, of the robot. 

Hod Lipson, a mechanical engineer who worked with Pollack on the
project, described it as ``nearly a self-replicating artificial
life system.'' 

It follows an earlier Brandeis project in which a computer used
evolutionary steps to design a bridge made of children's LEGO
blocks. 

``The LEGO bricks didn't move and we had to assemble them by hand.
In the current work the robots actually move and were assembled
without any manual labor, except for the snapping in of the
motors,'' Pollack said. 

However, automatically-produced robots would still be designed for
specific tasks and would not be the all-purpose humanoids of
science fiction. 

In a separate report in Nature, Laurent Keller and his colleagues
at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland described how they
taught robots community spirit by programming them to behave like
ants in foraging for food. 

They found that ``group dynamics of swarms of robots may follow
similar rules to those governing social insects.'' 



The New York Times on the Web
http://www.nytimes.com

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
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Joe Futrelle
Editor-within-chief,
Newspoetry dot com