Machines lay hands on building blocks of artificial life
New cubes on the block ... Hod Lipson holds parts of the robot he has designed to self-replicate. The robot starts as a stack of blocks, which builds a new stack in 2 minutes.
Photo: Kevin Stearns
A dream of robotics and a nightmare of science fiction has been achieved with the development of complex, self-reproducing machines.
American researchers have built a family of robots that can make working copies of themselves within minutes.
Hod Lipson, of Cornell University, said his team's creations demonstrated that self-reproduction "is not unique to biology". The ability to reproduce would be useful for robots that needed repairing in hazardous environments or on distant planets. "Self-replication is an extreme version of self-repair," Professor Lipson told the Herald.
Science fiction thrillers, including Michael Crichton's novel Prey, have painted doomsday scenarios of tiny robots running amok.
Prince Charles has also expressed concern at the prospect of the planet being turned into a "grey goo" by self-replicating machines.
Professor Lipson said self-replicating machines needed sources of energy and materials to build copies of themselves. "So they are easy to control. It would not be high on my priorities to worry about," he said.
The team's robots, described today in the journal Nature, are made of independently operating cubes about 10 centimetres wide, which are split into halves that can swivel.
Each cube contains computer instructions and is fitted with electromagnets so it can attach or detach from a neighbouring cube.
A flexible stack of four cubes can bend over, move blocks and build an identical stack within 2 minutes, as long as it has a supply of new cubes.
Professor Lipson said two other devices that could make copies of themselves had been developed, including a system of Lego blocks on tracks, but they were extremely simple and worked only in two dimensions.
His team's cube design allowed for a complex "family of robots" in different shapes and sizes to be built and reproduce in three dimensions.
Professor Hugh Durrant-Whyte, of the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney, said the new robots were an interesting development in a rapidly advancing field.
Other teams have developed robots that can change shape or split in two and recombine, he said. The biggest practical problem would be how to supply the robots with power in remote locations.
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