I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Get ready to geek out with some ideas about nature-inspired technology. In her talk from TED Women, 2021, computer scientist Emma Hart explains the concept of artificial evolution. It's a digital version of DNA that could help us unlock new designs

for wildly advanced robots. Imagine a scientist who wants to send a robot to explore in a faraway

place, a place whose geography might be completely unknown and perhaps inhospitable.

Now I imagine that instead of first designing that robot and sending it off in the hope that it might be suitable,

instead she sends a robot-producing technology that figures out what kind of robot is needed once it arrives, builds it,

and then enables it to continue to evolve to adapt to its new surroundings.

It's exactly what my collaborators and I are working on.

A radical new technology which enables robots to be created, reproduce and evolve over long periods of time.

A technology where robot design and fabrication becomes a task for machines rather than humans.

Robots are already all around us, in factories, in hospitals, in our home.

But from an engineer's perspective, designing a shelf-stacking robot or a

roomer to clean our home is relatively straightforward. We know exactly what they need to do,

and we can imagine the kind of situations they might find themselves in. So we're designed with this

in mind. But what if we want to send that robot to operate in a place that we have little or

even no knowledge about? For example, cleaning up legacy waste inside a nuclear reactor where it's

unsafe to send humans, mining for minerals deep in a trench at the bottom of the ocean, or exploring

a faraway asteroid.

How frustrating would it be if the human-designed robot

that had taken years to get to the asteroid

suddenly found it needed to drill a hole

to collect a sample or clamber up a cliff,

but it didn't have the right tools

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