2014年度职称英语阅读理解WingedRobotLearnstoFly.docVIP

第十五篇 Winged Robot Learns to Fly Learning how to fly took nature millions of years of trial and error1 —but a winged robot has cracked2 it in only a few hours, using the same evolutionary principles. Krister Wolff and Peter Nordin of Chalmers University of Technology (CUT) in Gothenburg , Sweden, built a winged robot and set about3 testing whether it could learn to fly by itself, without any pre-programmed data on what flapping is or how to do it. To begin with4, the robot just twitched and jerked erratically. But, gradually, it made movements that gained height. At first, it cheated—simply standing on its wing tips was one early short cut5. After three hours, however, the robot abandoned such methods in favor of6 a more effective flapping technique where it rotated its wings through 90 degrees and raised them before twisting them back to the horizontal and pushing down. “This tells us that this kind of evolution is capable of7 coming up8 with flying motion,” says Peter Bentley, who works on evolutionary computing at University College London. But while9 the robot had worked out how best to produce lift10, it was not about to take off. “There’s only so much that evolution can do,” Bentley says. “This thing is never going to fly because the motors will never have the strength to do it,” he says. The robot had metre-long wings made from balsa wood and covered with a light plastic film. Small motors on the robot let it move its wings forwards or backwards. up or down or twist them in either direction. The team attached the robot to two vertical rods, so it could slide up and down. At the start of a test, the robot was suspended by an elastic band. A movement detector measured how much lift, if any11, the robot produced for any given movement. A computer program fed the robot random instructions12, at the rate of13 20 per second, to test its flapping abilities. Each instruction told the robot either to do nothing or to move the wings slightly in the various directio