The Dynamic of Body and Brain Co-Evolution
Robotics
2020-11-24 v1 Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Abstract
We introduce a method that permits to co-evolve the body and the control properties of robots. It can be used to adapt the morphological traits of robots with a hand-designed morphological bauplan or to evolve the morphological bauplan as well. Our results indicate that robots with co-adapted body and control traits outperform robots with fixed hand-designed morphologies. Interestingly, the advantage is not due to the selection of better morphologies but rather to the mutual scaffolding process that results from the possibility to co-adapt the morphological traits to the control traits and vice versa. Our results also demonstrate that morphological variations do not necessarily have destructive effects on robot skills.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2011.11440,
title = {The Dynamic of Body and Brain Co-Evolution},
author = {Paolo Pagliuca and Stefano Nolfi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.11440},
year = {2020}
}