Challenges and perspectives of robot inventors that autonomously design, build, and test physical robots

For more than a century, researchers have been attracted by the problem of self-replicating machines, i.e., machines that can create their own copies. Historically, the idea has been investigated mainly in the virtual world, but there is an increasing interest in the physical implementation and experimentations in the last decade, owing to recent advances in the robotics and fabrication of flexible technologies. In this article, we introduce our research projects of "robot inventors" that can autonomously design, build, and test many physical robots with minimum human interventions, which, we believe, is a step closer toward physically self-replicating robots. Although there are still many challenges ahead, recent achievements provide the basic principles for creative machines and what they can perform in the real world. In this article, we introduce some of the recent robotic systems that we used in the iterative robotic invention experiments and discuss the challenges and perspectives toward the future.