Robot Evolution means crawling before learning to walk

Roboticists are applying the way we learn to walk as humans to robots, hoping to improve their movement and behaviours by enabling them to change their form as they learn to move.


Just as babies learn to crawl before they walk, a new line of robots at the University of Vermont are able to walk by learning from successful movements. This happens because their unique design makes it possible for them to change form as they learn to walk.

In the study, the robots wear a brace that gradually tilts their body and bends the legs, while the robot’s controller searches for successful movements. The robots begin in a crawl-like state and squirm around like a lizard on floor until they can figure out how to properly walk.

They have lots of moving parts. And their brains, like our brains, have lots of distributed materials: there’s neurons and there’s sensors and motors and they’re all turning on and off in parallel.. -Josh Bongard

Josh Bongard, leading the study on these evolving robots, is a roboticist at the University of Vermont. He released his discoveries earlier this month to the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

We’re copying nature, we’re copying evolution, we’re copying neural science when we’re building artificial brains into these robots.

Bongard’s work, funded by the National Science Foundation is aiming to produce robots that will perform simple tasks with the ability to be adaptable in unstructured or outdoor environments and instead of programming the robots the traditional way, the team at UVM are creating computer programs to help them develop the desired behaviours, while equipping them with tools to change their body.

Bondgard says the reason this hasn’t been done before is because “it is really hard to change a robot’s body… it’s much easier to change the programming inside its head”.

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