Robot’s that reproduce!

Simple but seminal: Cornell researchers build a robot that can reproduce

Now this was sort of a cool article. As an electrical engineer, I’m always interested in electronic gizmos.

I’ve designed numerous things in the past and what gets me is the idea of something healing itself, or reproducing itself. Think about it. What if your computer could “heal” itself after a power surge fried it? That would be cool. Or what if, when Microsoft releases a new operating system, your computer could just evolve to fit the new conditions?

However, what these Cornell students did isn’t really true “reproduction”. Their little robot is designed to start with predesigned modules to which other predesigned modules are then added. It reproduces by using these building blocks.

It doesn’t start with nothing and then design the building block.

One thing I find fascinating as an engineer is that evolution says life started from nothing and through random processes everything eventually came together. As a designer, I know that if you start with nothing and do nothing then what you end up with is a big pile of nothing.

When I design something, I start with something, then manipulate that something into something else.

As a designer I’m fascinated with my dog. I mean, she moves fluidly (no jerkiness like robots), she can reproduce (if we hadn’t had her fixed), she can process things (when I say “bunny” she runs to the door to see if there’s a rabbit out there), she powers herself (with food and water), she can heal herself, and she can respond to things very quickly.

I can’t imagine the amount of code I’d have to write merely to get the firmware responses down – much less the hardware to respond fluidly and that could heal itself or adapt to changes in the environment.

So from a purely engineering stand point, I don’t really buy into the whole blind luck of evolution. And in a previous post (Intelligent Design article), I pointed to a website where people with PhD’s in biology don’t buy into evolution either.

But still, those little robots are cool.