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EVANSTON, IL – Researchers at Northwestern University have developed a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence program that can design working robots from scratch in a matter of seconds.
To do this, the research team simply prompted the program to “design a robot that can walk on a flat surface.”
“It generates this random, sponge-like object, and evaluates its behavior. It might not be good at walking or whatever you want this robot to do,” said Sam Kriegman, assistant professor of computer and chemical and biological sciences. Engineering and mechanical engineering at the university. “Thanks to a simple but neat mathematical trick, she can see into the future and know how changes in the body will affect its behavior (and) make it better or worse.”
As the AI program changes the shape of the body and moves around the “muscles within its body,” it becomes better and better at what it was programmed to do, in this case walking on a flat surface. After only 10 attempts, the program was able to create a walking robot Seen in the video.
The software will allow anyone to “watch development in action” on their laptop or smartphone, Kriegman said. He also sees it as a major advance for science.
“If you think about, ‘How can we learn about evolution?’ “We don’t have a time machine, and we can’t travel back in time to see what happened on our planet and see how life emerged,” Kriegman said. “It is very difficult to do science in these conditions where there is no You only have one data point: life on Earth. “It’s hard to look at that data point and see what happened over time.”
Now, through the Northwestern research team’s program, anyone will be able to watch this AI development in action.
Kriegman said he hopes the breakthroughs will lead to new ideas and ultimately new and useful technologies.
