Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
Robot Reproduction
We will give birth by machine. We will build a thousand steam-
powered mothers. From them will pour forth a river of life. Noth-
ing but life! Nothing but robots! [Damon, in
Rossum's Universal
Robots
]
We're trying to build a robot out of Lego which can put together
a copy of itself with Lego pieces. Obviously you need motors and
some little computational units, but the big question is to deter-
mine what the fixed points in mechanical space are to create ob-
jects that can manipulate components of themselves and construct
themselves. [9]
Rodney Brooks, quoted above, is Director of the MIT Computer Science
and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is also chairman and chief tech-
nical officer of iRobot Corporation. His work at the forefront of robotics
research is blazing new trails that will have an immense impact on the
development of the super-robots envisaged in this chapter. And the idea
of robots reproducing by assembling other robots is more than just an
idea, it is already happening.
Serious scientific interest in the self-reproduction of machines be-
gan with John von Neumann's research into automata theory
4
during
the late 1950s and early-mid 1960s. Von Neumann had an enormously
wide range of scientific interests, being one of the co-inventors of Game
Theory (a branch of mathematics), a significant contributor to the logi-
cal foundations of Quantum Theory and, while he was working on the
Manhattan Project, a contributor to the design of the implosion mech-
anism for the plutonium bomb. Any study of the early history of the
theory of self-reproducing machines is virtually the same as the study of
von Neumann's thinking on the subject.
Von Neumann's research into automata had the goal of modelling
biological self-reproduction. He set out to investigate the logical organi-
zation of self-reproducing machines and proposed five different models
of self-replication, which he called the kinematic machine, the cellular
machine, the neuron type machine, the continuous machine and the
probabilistic machine. And when considering what capabilities should
4
Automata theory is a study of the principles underlying the operation of any electromechanical
device (an automaton) that converts information from one form into another according to a definite
procedure.
