Robots Become Self-Aware

Robots might one day trace the origin of their consciousness to recent experiments aimed at instilling them with the ability to reflect on their own thinking. Although granting machines self-awareness might seem more like the stuff of science fiction than science, there are solid practical reasons for doing so, researchers explain at Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Laboratory. This lack of adaptability is the reason we don't have many robots in the home, which is much more unstructured than the factory. The key is for robots to create a model of themselves to figure out what is working and not working in order to adapt.

So, researchers developed a robot shaped like a four-legged starfish whose brain, or controller, developed a model of what its body was like. The researchers started the droid off with an idea of what motors and other parts it had, but not how they were arranged, and gave it a directive to move. By trial and error, receiving feedback from its sensors with each motion, the machine used repeated simulations to figure out how its body was put together and evolved an ungainly but effective form of movement all on its own. Beyond robots that think about what they are thinking, researchers are also exploring if robots can model what others are thinking.

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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=automaton-robots-become-self-aware