“Researchers in France and the U.S. have developed a new technology that enables robots to quickly recover from an injury in less than two minutes, similar to how injured animals adapt. Such autonomous mobile robots would be useful in remote or hostile environments such as disaster areas, space, and deep oceans. “When injured, animals do not start learning from scratch,” says Jean-Baptiste Mouret from Pierre and Marie Curie University. “Instead, they have intuitions about different ways to behave. These intuitions allow them to intelligently select a few, different behaviors to try out and, after these tests, they choose one that works in spite of the injury. We made robots that can do the same.”“