In research different from all that preceded it, a group of researchers asked artificial intelligence to design a robot that could walk, and it did so, but in a strange way, as it created a “small, spongy, and deformed” robot that walks convulsively when full of air.
Researchers at Northwestern University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Vermont wrote their findings in an article for the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers explained: The artificial intelligence told us that we wanted a robot that could walk across the Earth. Then we simply pressed the button.
“In 26 seconds, the AI designed a blueprint for a robot that looked unlike any animal on Earth at all,” Sam Kriegman, an assistant professor at Northwestern University and the lead researcher behind the study, wrote in a separate blog post.
The artificial intelligence started with a small rubber block and designed different shapes before reaching the final design that can walk and the final design that walks after being pumped with air by one of the researchers, according to a research published in the scientific journal “Science Alert”.
When humans design robots, we tend to design them to look like familiar things, but AI can create new possibilities and new paths forward that humans have never thought of before, Kriegman said.
