Engineers have announced the invention of a robot capable of self-replicating “almost anything,” including new versions of itself.
Self-replicating robots are the product of a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They claim that the robot can assemble everything from vehicles to buildings in a practical and cost-effective manner.
The AI robot can determine complex tasks and organize necessary robot teams. (Illustrative image).
Amira Abdel-Rahman, a PhD student at MIT’s Bit and Atom Center, stated: “It can construct a structure, create another robot of the same size, or it can create a larger robot.”
Utilizing artificial intelligence, the robot can identify complex tasks and organize the necessary robot teams to build a structure without interfering with one another.
The system consists of small identical sub-units called voxels, which are essentially the volumetric equivalent of 2D pixels. These voxels can transmit and receive both energy and data from other voxels to build and operate.
Aaron Becker, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Houston, remarked: “This paper examines a crucial area of reconfigurable systems: How to quickly scale up the robot workforce and use it to efficiently assemble materials into a desired structure.”
“This is the first work I have seen addressing the problem from a completely new angle: using a variety of robotic parts to construct a robot assembly optimized for building the desired structure.”
A paper detailing the research, titled “A Self-replicating Hierarchical Modular Robot Swarm,” has been published in the journal Nature Communications Engineering.
