I saw the little robot in a daze in this virtual “gym”

If i ask If you want to design the perfect block-throwing robot, you might think of some humanoids, with legs for stability and hands for grasping. Who can blame you? If humans are good at something, it is throwing things.

The possibility of you thinking of the things in the video above is zero, a Frankenstein monster that seems to be a piece of Tetris. That’s because the computer “evolved” the robot’s body and the brain that controls it on a new platform in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.It is called Evolution gym, The robots of tomorrow can entrust their designs to algorithms instead of relying on human designers—and their human biases. Wojciech Matusik, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the co-founder of the system, said: “It is possible to find new and unexpected robot designs, and it is possible to obtain more high-performance robots.” “If you start with a very, very basic structure , How much intelligence can you really create?”

It turns out, a lot.On the top you will see a Software robot Learned how to do flips. Each color-coded “voxel” or cell in the robot has a purpose. Black represents a rigid block, and gray represents a soft block, neither of which is active.In contrast, color voxels are Actuator, Or any bit of the robot that produces motion. (In a typical rigid robot, these are the motors that power its joints.) Blue means the actuator contracts or expands vertically, while orange means it contracts or expands horizontally. So when you watch the robot flip, it basically rotates on the black rigid voxel in its center, while the colored actuator pushes it off the ground.

In contrast, this is a simple arched robot composed of only horizontally driven voxels. Basically legs. But by coordinating contraction and expansion, the voxel makes the machine move with amazing grace—it’s a bit gallop.

This is a person who has learned how to climb. Note the blue actuators on both sides of the base, they move alternately to buy on the surface, while an appendage on the top of the soft robot moves up the column. Another challenge is that the parts of the column are soft, so the machine must adapt to these parts when swinging upwards. For such a simple robot, this is a very complicated behavior, let alone a robot designed by yourself.