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EVANSTON, Illinois — Researchers at Northwestern University have developed a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence program that can design functioning robots from scratch in a matter of seconds.
To do this, the research team prompted the program to simply "design a robot that can walk on a flat surface."
"It generates this random body that kind of looks like a sponge, it evaluates its behavior. It's probably not so good at walking or whatever you want this robot to do," said Sam Kriegman, an assistant professor of computer science, chemical and biological engineering and mechanical engineering at the university. "Thanks to a little, neat mathematical trick, it can kind of see into the future and tell how changes to the body will affect its behavior (and) make it better or worse."
As the artificial intelligence program changes the shape of the object and moves around "muscles within its body," it becomes better and better at what it was programmed to do which, in this case, is walking across a flat surface. After just 10 attempts, the program was able to create the walking robot seen in the video.
Kriegman said that the program will allow anyone to "watch evolution in action" on their laptop or smartphone. He also sees it as a big advancement for science.
"If you think about, 'How can we learn about evolution?' We don't have a time machine, we can't travel back in time to see what happened on our planet (and) to see how life emerged," Kriegman said. "It's very difficult to do science in these conditions where you really only have a single data point: life on earth. And it's hard to look into that data point and see what happened over time."
Now, through the Northwestern research team's program, anyone will be able to watch this artificial intelligence evolution in action.
Kriegman said that he's hopeful the accomplishments will lead to new ideas and eventually, new, useful technologies.
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