Evolutionary Body Building: Adaptive Physical Designs for Robots

13 years 4 months ago

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Creating artiﬁcial life forms through evolutionary robotics faces a “chicken and egg” problem: learning to control a complex body is dominated by problems speciﬁc to its sensors and effectors, while building a body that is controllable assumes the pre-existence of a brain. The idea of co-evolution of bodies and brains is becoming popular, but little work has been done in evolution of physical structure because of the lack of a general framework for doing it. Evolution of creatures in simulation has usually resulted in virtual entities which are not buildable, while embodied evolution in actual robotics is constrained by the slow pace of real time. The work we present takes a step in the problem of body evolution by applying evolutionary techniques to the design of structures assembled out of elementary components which stick together. Evolution takes place in a simulator which computes forces and stresses and predicts stability of 3dimensional brick structures. The ﬁnal prin...

Pablo Funes, Jordan B. Pollack

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