How can you design adaptable robots?

1 Why adaptability?

Adaptability is a desirable feature for robots that operate in complex and dynamic scenarios, such as disaster relief, exploration, or service. Adaptability can improve the robot's performance, robustness, and autonomy, as well as reduce the human intervention and maintenance costs. Moreover, adaptability can enable robots to cope with uncertainty, diversity, and novelty, which are essential for solving novel problems and achieving long-term goals.

2 What is adaptability?

Adaptability is the ability of a system to change its structure, function, or behavior in response to external or internal stimuli. Adaptability can be seen as a spectrum that ranges from simple feedback loops to complex learning and evolution. Depending on the level of adaptability, robots can exhibit different types of behaviors, such as reactive, proactive, predictive, or creative. Adaptability can also be influenced by various factors, such as the robot's morphology, sensors, actuators, controllers, communication, and memory.

3 How to measure adaptability?

Measuring adaptability is not a straightforward task, as it depends on the context, the goal, and the criteria of evaluation. Nevertheless, there are some general metrics and methods that can be used to measure the adaptability of robots, such as fitness - how effective the robot is in a certain environment - robustness - how well the robot tolerates perturbations, faults, or changes - diversity - the range of behaviors or solutions the robot can generate - novelty - the number of new or unexpected behaviors or solutions the robot can produce - and complexity, which is about how many components, interactions, or information it can handle.

4 How to design adaptability?

Designing adaptability is a creative and iterative process that involves multiple steps and tools, such as defining the problem, choosing the level of adaptability, selecting the components, implementing the mechanisms, and testing and evaluating. During this process, you must consider the goal, environment, and constraints of the robot. Additionally, you need to determine what type and degree of adaptability is needed or desired for the robot. You will also need to select the hardware and software elements that will enable or support the adaptability of the robot as well as establish algorithms, rules, or processes that will govern the adaptability of the robot. Finally, you must measure and analyze the adaptability of the robot.

5 What are some examples of adaptable robots?

Robots can be adapted to different domains and applications in many ways, such as modular robots that can change their shape or configuration, soft robots that can deform or stretch their bodies, learning robots that can acquire new skills or knowledge, evolving robots that can modify their genes or parameters, and social robots that can communicate and coordinate with other robots or humans.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?