What can bats teach us about building smarter robots? | Rolf Mueller | TEDxMidAtlantic

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Robots in factories can afford to be stupid — we built a perfectly controlled world around them. Take one outside, into a forest or a field or "national security out in the dirt," and it falls apart. Rolf Mueller's work lives at that frontier: machines that have to be both genuinely nimble and genuinely smart in the messy real world. The catch is that fusing a capable body to a capable brain means searching a space so vast no supercomputer can brute-force it. His cheeky solution is intellectual-property theft — steal the answers from the one entity that already ran the search for billions of years: evolution. The thief's target is the bat. Mueller makes the case that bats are little superheroes carrying exactly the powers autonomy demands — sonar that brings its own light into total darkness, and powered flight no other mammal has — which is why more than one in five mammal species is a bat. But the detail that should stop you is how cheaply nature pulled it off. A bat matures in unde

Tags: AI, Biomimicry, English, Nature, Robots, Science, TEDxTalks, Technology, [TEDxEID:62191]