Putting the long-held belief that robots are programmed rigid is a new robot that can learn to adapt to its injury! Cornell researchers have built a robot that quite like a human baby teaches itself to walk. Then, when damaged, it teaches itself to limp.

Instead of giving the robot a rigid set of instructions, the researchers let it discover its own nature and work out how to control itself, a process that seems to resemble the way human and animal babies discover and manipulate their bodies. The ability to build this “self-model” is what makes it able to adapt to injury.

The robot, which looks like a four-armed starfish, starts out knowing only what its parts are, not how they are arranged or how to use them to fulfill its prime directive to move forward. Looks like we are bridging the gap of making robots more human than ever before!