AS IN a growing child, a flood of hormones will make robots bigger, stronger
and more independent. By including hormone-like messaging in a robotic control
system, a team at the University of Southern California’s Information Science
Institute in Marina del Rey has managed to overcome a problem that has been
dogging robotics.
Until now, no one has known how to enable a robot to add new parts to
itself—a process called “scaling”. Robots with this ability could explore
deep space independently: shipped to distant planets as a mass of tiny dumb
units, they would build themselves into whatever kind…
