Robots that can adapt like natural animals

While animals can quickly adapt to a wide variety of injuries, current robots cannot "think outside the box" to find a compensatory behavior when damaged: they are either limited to the contingency plans provided by their designers, or need many hours to search for suitable compensatory behaviors. We introduce an intelligent trial and error algorithm that allows robots to adapt to damage in less than 2 minutes, thanks to intuitions that they develop before their mission and experiments that they conduct to validate or invalidate them after damage. The result is a creative process that adapts to a variety of injuries, including damaged, broken, and missing legs. This new technique will enable more robust, effective, autonomous robots and suggests principles that animals may use to adapt to injury.