Animaris Percipiere

A beach-roaming creation of artist Theo Jansen. The robot is powered by wind.
Jansen is working to the day when he can release herds of autonomous wind-powered creature onto beaches in the Netherlands.

Each animal is made up of 375 replaceable tubes whose respective lengths represent the beast's very own unique "genetic code" influencing its quality and its walking pattern.
By using the pneumatic system as a foundation, Jansen hopes to eventually provide his beasts with nerves, muscles, advanced sensing capabilities and even rudimentary decision makers that mimic the function of the brain, before permanently releasing herds of them out onto the beach. Right now, he allows the animals to race each other and manually replaces the genetic code (tube lengths) of the winner into the rest of the losers.

He envisions the day when the roaming animals would meet each other compete and then the winner would copy his design to the loser to create an ever improving species.