  Artificial intelligence has made great strides in many areas lately, yet it
has had comparatively little success in general-use robotics. We believe one of
the reasons for this is the disconnect between traditional robotic design and
the properties needed for open-ended, creativity-based AI systems. To that end,
we, taking selective inspiration from nature, build a robust, partially soft
robotic limb with a large action space, rich sensory data stream from multiple
cameras, and the ability to connect with others to enhance the action space and
data stream. As a proof of concept, we train two contemporary machine learning
algorithms to perform a simple target-finding task. Altogether, we believe that
this design serves as a first step to building a robot tailor-made for
achieving artificial general intelligence.
