A humanoid robot has shown tendencies to mimic biological evolution with the help of a "brain" that automatically grows in size and complexity.
A humanoid robot created in Britain has shown tendencies to mimic biological evolution with the help of a "brain" that automatically grows in size and complexity.
A team of researchers led by Christopher MacLeod at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, UK, created the robot that adapts to such changes by mimicking biological evolution. Macleod's robot's software "brain" assigns new clusters of "neurons" to adapt to new additions to its body, according to a report in
the New Scientist magazine.
The artificial intelligence engineer said the team ran tests in which the whole "brain" was able to re-evolve, but the system became too complex and simply grounded to a halt.
The scientist is now taking his idea a step further, with a simulated robot that not only evolves its own way of moving, but also decides how many legs and sensors it needs to carry out a given task most effectively, the report said.
The humanoid is controlled by a neural network - software that mimics the brain's learning process. This comprises a set of interconnected processing nodes which can be trained to produce desired actions, the report said.
MacLeod's team took this idea a step further and developed an incremental evolutionary algorithm (IEA) capable of adding new parts to its robot brain over time.
The robot can also adapt to newly acquired vision, and learn how to avoid or seek light when given a camera. "This is just like the way the brain evolved, building up in layers," Macleod was quoted as saying in the report.
However, some scientists remain unconvinced. Just adding more neurons to the brain as things change is not enough, said Kevin Warwick, head of cybernetics at the University of Reading in the UK. The entire neural structure must also adapt.
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