The mother robot first glues one to five modules¹ together to make a child robot and put a slightly-different motor inside each cube. Then it tests how far each cube moves from a starting point in a certain amount of time, with the best individual's traits² carried over into the next generation. 

 

The lead researcher Dr Fumiya Iida said their experiments bring about interesting results. 

 

"The mother robot can actually build hundreds of child robots and see the performance of these child robots and, if their performance is good, keep their design for the next generation. And if bad, just let it go. And just repeating this iterative design improvement processes, the mother robot can actually gradually improve the performance of the child robot," 

 

Dr Fumiya Lida also said the mother robots produced a large number of robotic offspring³. 

 

"The largest experiment that we did so far, we built 500 robots; the mother robot generated⁴ 500 robots to see what one is good and which one is bad. And after all, we found quite an interesting design, the design of the child robots, that is very difficult for humans to design."

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