For decades, self-replicating robots have been a roboticist's dream--and a science-fiction writer's nightmare. Yet engineers haven't found a way to create 'bots that beget 'bots.
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Meanwhile, some say that the concept of self-replication needs a rethink. Researchers have thought that a system is either self-replicating or it isn't, Lipson says. But given that even biological systems rely heavily on their environment, it seems there are different shades of self-replication.
(Science 16 November 2007: Vol. 318. no. 5853, pp. 1088 - 1093)
Robotics researchers increasingly agree that ideas from biology and self-organization can strongly benefit the design of autonomous robots. Biological organisms have evolved to perform and survive in a world characterized by rapid changes, high uncertainty, indefinite richness, and limited availability of information. Industrial robots, in contrast, operate in highly controlled environments with no or very little uncertainty. Although many challenges remain, concepts from biologically inspired (bio-inspired) robotics will eventually enable researchers to engineer machines for the real world that possess at least some of the desirable properties of biological organisms, such as adaptivity, robustness, versatility, and agility.
