Related papers: Evolution of sustained foraging in 3D environments…
Using a simple model for the trail formation of ants, the relation between i)the schedule of feeding which represents the unsteady natural environment, ii)emerging patterns of trails connecting a nest with food resources, and iii)the…
Humans excel at robust bipedal walking in complex natural environments. In each step, they adequately tune the interaction of biomechanical muscle dynamics and neuronal signals to be robust against uncertainties in ground conditions.…
Biological information processing manifests a huge variety in its complexity and capability among different organisms, which presumably stems from the evolutionary optimization under limited computational resources. Starting from the…
Collective behavior, and swarm formation in particular, has been studied from several perspectives within a large variety of fields, ranging from biology to physics. In this work, we apply Projective Simulation to model each individual as…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
We study the dynamics of a \emph{myopic} forager that randomly wanders on a lattice in which each site contains one unit of food. Upon encountering a food-containing site, the forager eats all the food at this site with probability $p<1$;…
We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…
Animals locomote for various reasons: to search for food, find suitable habitat, pursue prey, escape from predators, or seek a mate. The grand scale of biodiversity contributes to the great locomotory design and mode diversity. Various…
Despite the fact that grouping behavior has been actively studied for over a century, the relative importance of the numerous proposed fitness benefits of grouping remain unclear. We use a digital model of evolving prey under simulated…
Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…
The complexity of a legged robot's environment or task can inform how specialised its gait must be to ensure success. Evolving specialised robotic gaits demands many evaluations - acceptable for computer simulations, but not for physical…
Animals foraging alone are hypothesized to optimize the encounter rates with resources through L\'evy walks. However, the issue of how the interactions between multiple foragers influence their search efficiency is still not completely…
Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which…
Fitness consequence of dispersal depends on property of the entire landscape, which patches are available and what are the cost of moving. These are information that are not available locally when an organism make the decision to disperse.…
In any ecosystem, the conditions of the environment and the characteristics of the species that inhabit it are entangled, co-evolving in space and time. We introduce a model that couples active agents with a dynamic environment, interpreted…
This paper demonstrates that simple yet important characteristics of coevolution can occur in evolutionary algorithms when only a few conditions are met. We find that interaction-based fitness measurements such as fitness (linear) ranking…
Robot controllers are often optimised for a single robot in a single environment. This approach proves brittle, as such a controller will often fail to produce sensible behavior for a new morphology or environment. In comparison, animal…
Unraveling patterns of animals' movements is important for understanding the fundamental basics of biogeography, tracking range shifts resulting from climate change, predicting and preventing biological invansions. Many researchers have…
We investigate the matching of agents to resources in a computational ecology configured to present heterogeneous resource patches to evolving, neurally controlled agents. We repeatedly find a nearly optimal, ideal free distribution (IFD)…
A successful robot-assisted feeding system requires bite acquisition of a wide variety of food items. It must adapt to changing user food preferences under uncertain visual and physical environments. Different food items in different…