(May 28, 2015) Robots
will one day provide tremendous benefits to society, such as in search-and-
rescue missions and putting out forest fires -- but not until they can learn to
keep working if they become damaged.
Jeff Clune, a University of Wyoming assistant professor in
the Department of Computer Science contributed to a paper, titled “Robots That
Can Adapt Like Animals,” that shows how to make robots automatically recover
from injury in less than two minutes. The paper appeared in today’s (May 28)
issue of Nature, an international weekly journal of science that publishes the
finest peer-reviewed research in all fields of science and technology.
Antoine Cully, lead author of the paper and a doctoral
student at Pierre and Marie Curie University in France; and Jean-Baptiste
Mouret, a then-assistant professor of artificial intelligence at Pierre and
Marie Curie University, led the work. They collaborated with Clune and Danesh
Tarapore, a then-doctoral student from Pierre and Marie Curie University.
Tarapore is now a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of York in the
United Kingdom.