Environmental resilience via morphological diversity within machines
2026-08-03 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors suggest that organisms are made of many parts interacting at different sizes, which helps them adapt to new challenges. They propose that dealing with internal physical problems (like parts being connected in unexpected ways) can prepare organisms to handle external problems (like new environments). Their experiments show that when they connect different agents together, the agents learn to manage these disruptions and this experience helps them handle new situations without extra learning. They also found that collectives with more or more diverse agents are better at adapting. This idea could help design machines that are more resilient by using smaller interacting machines.
sensorimotor systemsmorphological diversityresilienceagent collectivesphysical connectorsadaptive behaviorinternal adversityexternal environmentmachine learningtethering
Authors
Alice Hein, Josh Bongard
Abstract
Organisms contain diverse, sensorimotor parts across size scales and rapidly adapt to new environments, while machines contain only inert materials at smaller scales and struggle with surprise. We hypothesize that this agents-within-agents quality of organisms may aid their resilience: increasing experiences with internal physical adversity may pre-train organisms and machines to handle external adversity, such as encounters with new environments. Not only has this hypothesis not yet been articulated, mechanisms enabling this phenomenon have yet to be proposed. Here we show a mechanism by which this can occur: we found that physical connectors, in learning to restore behavior to previously independent, morphologically diverse agents they disrupted by tethering them together, trigger and tame sufficiently diverse disruptions that later encounters with new environments trigger disruptions that fall within this manageable range, enabling the collective to continue behaving properly without any additional learning or adaptation. Further, we found that building collectives from more agents, or more diverse agents, further increases the collective's resilience to new environments. This suggests that not just taming but intentionally creating internal physical adversity may indeed prepare organisms for external adversity, and could do so for machines, if they were built from smaller machines.