Inside Keith Brown’s lab in Boston University’s College of Engineering, a robot arm drops small, plastic objects into a box placed perfectly on the floor to catch them as they fall. One by one, these tiny structures—feather-light, cylindrical pieces, no bigger than an inch tall—fill the box. Some are red, others blue, purple, green, or black.
Each object is the result of an experiment in robot autonomy. On its own, learning as it goes, the robot is searching for, and trying to make, an object with the most efficient energy-absorbing shape to ever exist.