Self-assembling robots and the potential of

arti cial evolution

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00:01

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Imagine a scientist who wants to send a robot to explore in a faraway

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place, a place whose geography might be completely unknown and

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perhaps inhospitable. Now imagine that instead of rst designing that

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robot and sending it off in the hope that it might be suitable, instead, she
sends a robot-producing technology that gures out what kind of robot is
needed once it arrives, builds it and then enables it to continue to evolve
to adapt to its new surroundings.

00:32
It’s exactly what my collaborators and I are working on: a radical new
technology which enables robots to be created, reproduce and evolve
over long periods of time, a technology where robot design and
fabrication becomes a task for machines rather than humans.

00:52
Robots are already all around us, in factories, in hospitals, in our home.
But from an engineer's perspective, designing a shelf-stacking robot or a

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Roomba to clean our home is relatively straightforward. We know exactly
what they need to do, and we can imagine the kind of situations they
might nd themselves in. So we design with this in mind. But what if we
want to send that robot to operate in a place that we have little or even no
knowledge about? For example, cleaning up legacy waste inside a
nuclear reactor where it's unsafe to send humans, mining for minerals
deep in a trench at the bottom of the ocean, or exploring a faraway
asteroid. How frustrating would it be if the human-designed robot, that
had taken years to get to the asteroid suddenly found it needed to drill a
hole to collect a sample or clamber up a cliff but it didn't have the right
tools or the right means of locomotion to do so? If instead we had a
technology that enabled the robots to be designed and optimized in situ,
in the environment in which they need to live and work, then we could

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potentially save years of wasted effort and produce robots that are
uniquely adapted to the environments that they nd themselves in.

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02:11

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So to realize this technology, we've been turning to nature for help. All

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around us, we see examples of biological species that have evolved
smart adaptations that enable them to thrive in a given environment. For
example, in the Cuban rainforest, we nd vines that have evolved leaves
that are shaped like human-designed satellite dishes. These leaves direct
bats to their owers by amplifying the signals that the bats send out,
therefore, improving pollination. What if we could create an arti cial
version of evolution that would enable robots to evolve in a similar
manner as biological organisms?

02:56
I'm not talking about biomimicry, a technology which simply copies what's
observed in nature. What we're hoping to harness is the creativity of
evolution, to discover designs that are not observed here on Earth, the
human engineer might not have thought of or even be capable of
conceiving. In theory, this evolutionary design technology could operate

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completely autonomously in a faraway place. But equally it could be
guided by humans. Just as we breed plants for qualities such as drought
resistance or taste, the human robot breeder could guide arti cial
evolution to producing robots with speci c qualities. For example, the
ability to squeeze through a narrow gap or perhaps operate at low energy.

03:48
This idea of arti cial evolution imitating biological evolution using a
computer program to breed better and better solutions to problems over
time isn't actually new. In fact, arti cial evolution, algorithms operating
inside a computer, have been used to design everything from tables to
turbine blades. Back in 2006, NASA even sent a satellite into space with a

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communication antenna that had been designed by arti cial evolution.

04:20

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But evolving robots is actually much harder than evolving passive objects
such as tables, because robots need brains as well as bodies in order to

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make sense of the information in the world around them and translate that
into appropriate behaviors. So how do we do it? Surprisingly, evolution
only needs three ingredients: a population of individuals which exhibit
some physical variations; a method of reproduction in which offspring
inherit some traits from their parents and occasionally acquire new ones
via mutation; and nally, a means of natural selection. So we can
replicate these three ingredients to evolve robots using a mixture of
hardware and software. The rst task is to design a digital version of
DNA. That is a digital blueprint that describes the robot's brain, its body,
its sensory mechanisms and its means of locomotion. Using a randomly
generated set of these blueprints, we can create an initial population of
10 or more robots to kick-start this evolutionary process. We've designed
a technology that can take the digital blueprint and turn it into a physical
robot without any need for human assistance. For example, it uses a 3D
printer to print the skeleton of the robot and then an automated assembly
arm like you might nd in a factory to add any electronics and moving

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parts, including a small computer that acts as a brain. And to enable this
brain to adapt to the new body of the robot, we send every robot
produced to an equivalent of a kindergarten, a place where the newborn
robot can re ne its motor skills almost like a small child would. To mimic
natural selection, we score these robots on the ability to conduct a task.
And then we use these scores to selectively decide which robots get to
reproduce. The reproduction mechanism mixes the digital DNA of the
chosen parent robots to create a new blueprint for a child robot that
inherits some of the characteristics from its parents but occasionally also
exhibits some new ones. And by repeating the cycle of selection and
reproduction over and over again, we hope that we can breed successive
generations of robots where, just like is often observed in biological
evolution, each generation gets better than the last, with the robots

environment that they nd themselves in.

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gradually optimizing their form and their behavior to the task and the

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07:11

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Now, although this can all take place in a time frame that's much faster

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than biological evolution, which sometimes takes thousands of years, it's
still relatively slow in terms of the time frames we might expect in our
modern world to design and produce an artifact. It's mainly due to the 3D
printing process, which can take more than four hours per robot,
depending on the complexity and the shape of the robot. But we can give
our arti cial evolutionary process a helping hand to reduce the number of
physical robots that we actually need to make. We create a digital copy of
every robot produced inside a simulation in a computer, and we allow this
virtual population of robots to evolve. Now it's quite likely that the
simulation isn't a very accurate representation of the real world. But it has
an advantage that it enables models of robots to be created and tested in
seconds rather than hours. So using the simulator technology, we can
quickly explore the potential of a wide range of robot types of different
shapes and sizes, of different sensory con gurations, and quickly get a
rough estimate of how useful each robot may be before we physically

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make it. And we predict that by allowing a novel form of breeding in which
a physical robot can breed with one of its virtual cousins, then the useful
traits that have been discovered in simulation will quickly spread into the
physical robot population, where they can be further re ned in situ.

08:48
It might sound like science ction, but actually there's a serious point.
While we expect the technology that I've just described to be useful in
designing robots, for example, to work in situations where it's unsafe to
send humans or to help us pursue our scienti c quest for exoplanetary
exploration, there are some more pragmatic reasons why we should
consider arti cial evolution. As climate change gathers pace, it is clear

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that we need a radical rethink to our approach to robotic design here on

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Earth in order to reduce that ecological footprint. For example, creating

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new designs of robot built from sustainable materials that operate at low

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energy, that are repairable and recyclable. It's quite likely that this new

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generation of robots won't look anything like the robots that we see
around us today, but that's exactly why arti cial evolution might help.

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Discovering novel designs by processes that are unfettered by the
constraints that our own understanding of engineering science imposes
on the design process.

10:02
Thank you.

10:03
(Applause)

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