"And, in their final form, the changing robots had developed a more robust gait."

Ray Kurzweil is a brilliant guy who seems maybe a little too optimistic about technological advances on our horizon. But he has an interesting post on his blog about robots that are being developed that start out as “tadpoles” and morph and change over their lives, which seems to help them learn how to walk better. An excerpt:

“In a first-of-its-kind experiment, University of Vermont roboticist Josh Bongard created both simulated and actual robots that, like tadpoles becoming frogs, change their body forms while learning how to walk. Over generations, his simulated robots also evolved, spending less time in ‘infant’ tadpole-like forms and more time in ‘adult’ four-legged forms.

These evolving populations of robots were able to learn to walk more rapidly than ones with fixed body forms. And, in their final form, the changing robots had developed a more robust gait — better able to deal with, say, being knocked with a stick — than the ones that had learned to walk using upright legs from the beginning.

‘This paper shows that body change, morphological change, actually helps us design better robots,’ Bongard says. ‘That’s never been attempted before.'”