Scientists Help Robots 'Evolve.' Weirdness Ensues

Evolution is a trip. “A Bezier curve is if you're in Microsoft Paint and you define a curve by clicking on a couple of control points, but it's in three dimensions,” says research scientist David Howard of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to Robots The simulation looks at the “fitness” of a given leg if it were walking on one of three surfaces: hard soil, gravel, or through water. Only instead of selecting for traits like good eyesight or camouflage, like natural selection would in nature, the system selects for how much torque a motor would have to exert if it had to power a leg shaped a particular way to walk across one of the surfaces. “If we have a gravel surface and we walk the leg through it, we calculate the forces on the individual pieces of gravel,” says Howard.