It seems the future has finally arrived. So, a team from the University of Bristol has created a new algorithm that will make robots much more "human" than they are now. The new achievement of scientists, published in the journal Science Robotics, proves that in the near future robots will learn to help humans, becoming practically indistinguishable from him.
Can robots be human-like?
Inspired by an example from biology, researchers at the University of Bristol have come up with a concept of a computer with a special soft substance that will mimic the work of the cardiovascular system.
Guided by the knowledge of its structure, the researchers, led by professor of robotics Jonathan Rossiter, successfully demonstrated a new mechanism that made it possible to embed a new motion algorithm into three soft robots at once. In their article, the team of researchers describes the functions of a conductive liquid receptor, which is almost the complete analogue of human blood and a new fundamental building block for a number of new generation robots.
The new generation of robots will even have their own blood.
According to the report of Professor Rossiter, in the near future computers with soft matter could, if necessary, start all the most important processes that will occur in the "body" of the robot. In order for everything to work out, and the robot could make its first "meaningful" movements, soft matter will have to translate all the information it receives into the structure of a flowing tape that would imitate the processes taking place in human blood. So, the action of the fluid tape will have to spread through the entire body of the robot in order for the necessary signal to be detected by the corresponding receptor and could be transmitted to one or another artificial "nerve ending".
In order to explain the complex in simple terms, Professor Rossiter demonstrated to the public the robotic worm he created, which was programmed by an internal computer with soft matter.
Promotional video:
Video of the soft robot worm:
According to the professor, soft robots can become even more alive over time: they will be able to independently adapt to the environment and demonstrate the variety of behavior observed in the natural world.
Daria Eletskaya