Simplicity may be key to robotic self-reproduction

“Self-reproduction is one of the remarkable feats of biological systems which has remained largely outside the scope of capabilities of traditional engineered systems,” explains Victor Zykov and his colleagues from Cornell University in a recent study in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

Zykov, Efstathios Mytilinaios, Mark Desnoyer, and Hod Lipson have examined the meaning of such concepts as “self-reproduction” and “evolution” when applied to non-living machines.

The engineers designed and built a set of modular robots that can be combined into machines of varying sizes that will in turn be able to construct identical copies of themselves. The group experimented with both physical and virtual machines that were manually designed to self-reproduce, as well as self-reproducing machines that were artificially evolved. In the future, self-reproducing machines could be essential for applications prohibiting human maintenance.

Read full story in PhysOrg