Scientists create self-healing robots with 'Borg-like' ability to adapt to damage

Intelligent robots that can adapt to injury, or even become more powerful under attack, are a mainstay of science fiction. Now scientists have developed the real-life version: robots that can “adapt like animals” to injuries and recover within minutes.

The ability for robots to cope with unforeseen challenges is seen as a crucial step towards the widespread use of smart machines everywhere from the home to the battlefield, but until now scientists have struggled to develop machines that work alone without human intervention.

Jeff Clune, a computer scientist at the University of Wyoming, said: “Everything we take for granted works so well because nature’s worked at it for so long. If we get a splinter in our heel, we just start walking on our tiptoes, we don’t even think about how we’re doing it.”

Clune and his colleagues have managed to reproduce this “animal-like” ability to adapt to injury in a six-legged walking robot and a mechanical arm designed to pick up objects.

Videos recorded by the researchers show the six-legged robot initially flailing helplessly like a squashed spider after the power is cut to one of its legs. But after trying out a variety of alternative strategies, within two minutes it has adopted an entirely new gait - something akin to a pounce - allowing it to proceed towards a target despite being damaged.

Crucially, the robots adapt through an “intelligent trial and error” strategy that allows it to cope with new challenges independently, rather than being pre-programmed to deal with every imaginable obstacle. This meant that the robots frequently surprised their makers with the solutions they came up with and in some cases their performance even improved following the damage due to new strategies they devised.

“It definitely can produce unpredictable results,” said Clune. “In one of our examples, once the robot lost one of its legs it discovered a new, even faster way to walk.”