Despite significant advancements in robotics, robots still fall short of animals in terms of movement capabilities. Dr. Max Donelan of Simon Fraser University illustrates this with examples: "A wildebeest can migrate for thousands of kilometres over rough terrain, a mountain goat can climb up a literal cliff, finding footholds that don't even seem to be there, and cockroaches can lose a leg and not slow down. We have no robots capable of anything like this endurance, agility and robustness."
An interdisciplinary team, including Drs. Sam Burden, Tom Libby, Kaushik Jayaram, and Simon Sponberg, studied the performance of running robots by comparing them to biological systems. Their findings, published in Science Robotics, revealed that while individual robotic components often perform better than their biological counterparts, animals surpass robots in integrating these components for efficient movement.
"The way things turned out is that, with only minor exceptions, the engineering subsystems outperform the biological equivalents – and sometimes radically outperformed them. But also what's very, very clear is that, if you compare animals to robots at the whole system level, in terms of movement, animals are amazing. And robots have yet to catch up," noted Libby. However, Burden pointed out the potential for rapid progress in robotics, contrasting it with the slow pace of natural evolution. He emphasized the ability to iteratively improve robotic designs, a capability that biological evolution lacks: "It will move faster, because evolution is undirected. Whereas we can very much correct how we design robots and learn something in one robot and download it into every other robot, biology doesn't have that option. So there are ways that we can move much more quickly when we engineer robots than we can through evolution – but evolution has a massive head start."
