ChatGPT designs its own robot, together with researchers

From poetry, essays and recipes to the design of robots, you don’t have to go too far, as shown by ChatGPT, which has designed its first robot together with a group of researchers, helping them in all the stages. The system based on Artificial Intelligence has helped design a robot arm able to pick tomatoes, and its advice, ideas and suggestions have been implemented by the research group from the Dutch university of Delft, including two Italians, and by a researcher from the Federal Polytechnic in Lausanne. Published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, the result has had positive outcomes, but for the moment a scenario in which ChatGPT can design a robot in autonomous mode is not possible or either, in the researchers view, a desirable poutcome.



"We wanted ChatGPT to design not any kind of robot,” said Cosimo Della Santina, co-author of the study led by Francesco Stella, “but one that was really useful”. The choice therefore fell onto a robot tomato picker, a crop that in ChatGPT’s view would be cheaper and easier to automate.



The researchers followed the advice of the chatbot in relation to the design, which was particularly useful in the conception stage: "ChatGPT can broaden the knowledge of the engineers to other areas of competence", says Stella. "And yet,“Stella adds, “we realized that our role as engineers shifted onto the execution of the most technical tasks".