There’s still a long list of things that separate robots and living beings, but a new study suggests that the list has become just a bit shorter. Developing robots that “grow,” “heal,” and adapt their bodies to their surroundings, researchers from Columbia University have demonstrated that robots can become bigger and better by “consuming” other robots — a process that’s a lot like the metabolism in a living being.
This “robot metabolism,” described in a paper published today in Science Advances, allows a robot to integrate the material of other machines into its body, representing an important step towards making robots more resilient and self-sufficient.
“True autonomy means robots must not only think for themselves but also physically sustain themselves,” said Philippe Martin Wyder, a study author and a researcher at Columbia Engineering and the University of Washington, in a press release. “Just as biological life absorbs and integrates resources, these robots grow, adapt, and repair using materials from their environment or from other robots.”
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Robot Brains and Bodies
Today’s robots are already thinking a lot like living beings. Indeed, as artificial intelligence (AI) steadily advances the ability of robots to think and to learn, the lines between robotics and biology increasingly blur. However, there are still some biological functions that robots are unable to replicate.
While biological life forms are open systems, absorbing materials from their surroundings to grow and heal, robots are closed systems, limiting their capacity to become truly autonomous.
"Robot minds have moved forward by leaps and bounds in the past decade through machine learning, but robot bodies are still monolithic, unadaptive, and unrecyclable,” said Hod Lipson, another study author and a professor at Columbia Engineering, in a press release. “Biological bodies, in contrast, are all about adaptation — lifeforms can grow, heal, and adapt. In large part, this ability stems from the modular nature of biology that can use and reuse modules (amino acids) from other lifeforms.”
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Simple Robots for Complex “Robot Metabolism”
To get robots to metabolize — to make meals out of the parts of other robots — the researchers designed the Truss Link, an expandable and contractable robotic bar that’s equipped with a magnetic connector on either end.
By expanding and contracting, an individual Truss Link can crawl both forwards and backwards across a surface. But by connecting to other Truss Links to create complex structures (and by strategically expanding and contracting individual Truss Links in those complex structures to move), a construction of these robots can crawl much more dynamically.
In a series of tests, the researchers demonstrated that the Truss Links could connect together and then adapt, almost like a living organism, by consuming other Truss Links. Starting with six independent Truss Links, they watched as the robots self-assembled into two two-dimensional shapes — a triangle and a three-pointed star — and then into one three-dimensional tetrahedron. In some tests, these structures grew by gobbling up new Truss Links and incorporating them into their system. In others, they healed by repairing their connections and by removing and replacing faulty Truss Links with newly consumed ones.
According to the researchers, the Truss Links show that the best way to build strong, self-supporting robots is by sticking to simpler machines that can arrange themselves into much more complicated assemblies — assemblies that can adapt like life can, by metabolizing the resources in the world around them.
“As we hand off more and more of our lives to robots — from driverless cars to automated manufacturing, and even defense and space exploration — who is going to take care of these robots?” Lipson added in the release. “We can’t rely on humans to maintain these machines. Robots must ultimately learn to take care of themselves.”
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Article Sources
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Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
