Self-Reproducing Machines: Preventing Degeneracy

Abstract

Machines produced by humans exhibit insufficient complexity to produce similar machines. As John von Neumann originally postulated, if biological systems are able to successfully reproduce, then there must be some characteristic that we can embed in machines to give them the ability to reproduce. Such a self-reproductive machine, also imbued with the ability to do constructive work, could prove enormously useful to the human race. This paper considers a simple self-reproducing machine, which consists of a 2-DOF, planar robot arm capable of picking up and placing the components of another arm. If the robot places the components within the allowable tolerance, then the original arm has successfully reproduced. An assembly line is constructed, so that a self-reproduction process can proceed along a track. If this process eventually fails because one robot is not capable of assembling another, then the system is said to be degenerate. Otherwise, the system is sustainable. A kinematic model that maps component placement errors from one generation of the robot arm to the next was derived. The system exhibited exponential growth in component placement errors. Thus, this self-reproduction system is degenerate. This system is then augmented to provide error-correction during the assembly process. With the application of error-correction the self-reproduction process is made sustainable. The minimal amount of error-correction required to achieve sustainable self-reproduction was investigated through sensor quantization, and it was shown that the amount of fidelity in the error-correction signal determines the success of the self-reproduction process. This self-reproduction system was also analyzed in the context of Kabamba's Generation Theory, which could predict the results obtained through simulation regarding degeneracy or sustainability.