The team’s AI system created this little robot with a flat face, holes, and three legs. (Image Credit: Northwestern University)
This is a frightening result. Not because AI is making a robot to subjugate humanity, but AI is inching closer to taking lots of engineering jobs!
Northwestern University researchers developed an AI program with robot designing capabilities --- it accomplished this feat in seconds! Running on a lightweight PC, this AI designs robotic systems and structures from scratch. It’s very unique compared to other power-intensive systems that rely on huge datasets. Even after they process that data, those systems still replicate humans’ creative work without producing new concepts.
“We discovered a very fast AI-driven design algorithm that bypasses the traffic jams of evolution without falling back on the bias of human designers,” said Northwestern’s Sam Kriegman, who led the work. “We told the AI that we wanted a robot that could walk across land. Then we simply pressed a button, and presto! It generated a blueprint for a robot in the blink of an eye that looks nothing like any animal that has ever walked the earth. I call this process ‘instant evolution.’”
The team also tested their AI program by prompting it to design a robot that walks across a flat surface. At this point, it came up with a soap bar-sized block structure, which jiggled. Once the system realized it hadn’t completed the assigned task, it came up with different design iterations. When it created a new version, the system evaluated the design, spotted flaws, and worked on the structure by whittling on the simulated block. The bot eventually bounced, hopped forward, and shuffled. It took nine attempts for the AI to produce a robot that walks at half the speed of a human stride. That only required twenty-six seconds for the system to design a simulated walking robot.
“Now anyone can watch evolution in action as AI generates better and better robot bodies in real-time,” Kriegman said. “Evolving robots previously required weeks of trial and error on a supercomputer, and of course, before any animals could run, swim or fly around our world, there were billions upon billions of years of trial and error. This is because evolution has no foresight. It cannot see into the future to know if a specific mutation will be beneficial or catastrophic. We found a way to remove this blindfold, thereby compressing billions of years of evolution into an instant.”
The AI program’s robotic structure consists of three legs, fins along its back, a flat face, and holes. “It’s interesting because we didn’t tell the AI that a robot should have legs,” Kriegman said. “It rediscovered that legs are a good way to move around on land. Legged locomotion is, in fact, the most efficient form of terrestrial movement.”
The Northwestern University researchers 3D-printed the robot to see if it can walk. (Image Credit: Northwestern University)
The team then wanted to see if the AI’s creation could work in real life. So they used it as a blueprint, 3D-printing a mold of the negative space surrounding the body. Afterward, they filled the mold with liquid silicone rubber, curing it for two hours. This resulted in a squishy and flexible body.
Then, the team wanted to see if the bot could replicate its walking ability in the real world. So, they filled its rubber body with air, causing the legs to expand. Its legs contracted after the air escaped. Constantly pumping air into the body causes it to expand and contract repetitively, resulting in slow and stable locomotion.
However, the randomly punctured holes piqued the researchers’ curiosity. They think it’s done to make the structure more lightweight and flexible so the robot can bend its legs to walk. “We don’t really know what these holes do, but we know that they are important,” Kriegman said. “Because when we take them away, the robot either can’t walk anymore or can’t walk as well.”
Overall, this AI program could be beneficial in the future by designing robots that navigate through a collapsed building’s rubble, following thermal and vibration signatures to locate trapped humans and animals or move in sewers to identify problems, unclog pipes, and repair damage. Additionally, the program could design nano-bots for medical purposes --- entering the human body and moving through the bloodstream to kill cancer cells, diagnose illnesses, or unclog arteries.
“The only thing standing in our way of these new tools and therapies is that we have no idea how to design them,” Kriegman said. “Lucky for us, AI has ideas of its own.”
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