Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
replicating systems technology will fear an accelerating economic
and cultural gulf between the haves and the have-nots. On another
level altogether, humankind as a species may regard the burgeoning
machine population as competitors for scarce energy and material
resources, even if the net return from the SRS population is posi-
tive. [11]
And on the subject of robot predators the report was no less cautious:
Predation is one interesting possibility. Much as predator animals
are frequently introduced in National Parks as a population con-
trol measure, we might design predator machines which ate either
“species specific” (attacking only one kind of SRS whose numbers
must be reduced) or a kind of “universal destructor” (able to take
apart any foreign machine encountered, stockpiling the parts and
banking the acquired information). Such devices are logically pos-
sible but would themselves have to be carefully controlled. [11]
On a less pessimistic note the report pointed out that, if the robots in-
troduced by man to control the predators are also manufactured by man,
so that their numbers will tend to increase at a fixed rate rather than ex-
ponentially, this population of “good” robots will be able to control an
exponentially increasing population of “bad” robots because the rate of
destruction will be far more rapid than that of replication of the “bad”
robots. But this could be wishful thinking. Who knows how quickly
robots may be coming off the assembly lines of the future?
The NASA proposal was quietly declined by the U.S. Government,
with barely a ripple in the press. But what was conceivable with 1980s
technology is now even more practical today.
Robot Evolution
Find a bug in a program, and fix it, and the program will work to-
day. Show the program how to find and fix a bug, and the program
will work forever. [12]
Evolutionary robotics combines self-reproducing software with self-
reproducing hardware in an attempt to develop robots through a self-
organized process based on artificial evolution. An initial population of
different artificial chromosomes, each encoding the control system (and
sometimes the shape) of a robot, is randomly created and put into an en-
vironment. Each robot is then let free to act as it wishes (to move, to look
