Related papers: Towards the Targeted Environment-Specific Evolutio…
Robots are notoriously difficult to design because of complex interdependencies between their physical structure, sensory and motor layouts, and behavior. Despite this, almost every detail of every robot built to date has been manually…
Evolution and development operate at different timescales; generations for the one, a lifetime for the other. These two processes, the basis of much of life on earth, interact in many non-trivial ways, but their temporal hierarchy --…
Evolutionary computation offers a variety of tools to solve complex real-world optimization problems. However, research often focuses on smaller, simplified problems and optimization algorithms that sometimes miss expectations in real-world…
In this review we introduce the framework of reality-assisted evolution to summarize a growing trend towards combining model-based and model-free approaches to improve the design of physically embodied soft robots. In silico, data-driven…
In robotics, methods and softwares usually require optimizations of hyperparameters in order to be efficient for specific tasks, for instance industrial bin-picking from homogeneous heaps of different objects. We present a developmental…
Natural lifeforms specialise to their environmental niches across many levels; from low-level features such as DNA and proteins, through to higher-level artefacts including eyes, limbs, and overarching body plans. We propose Multi-Level…
In nature, biological organisms jointly evolve both their morphology and their neurological capabilities to improve their chances for survival. Consequently, task information is encoded in both their brains and their bodies. In robotics,…
Terrain adaptation is an essential capability for a ground robot to effectively traverse unstructured off-road terrain in real-world field environments such as forests. However, the expected robot behaviors generated by terrain adaptation…
Robots are used in more and more complex environments, and are expected to be able to adapt to changes and unknown situations. The easiest and quickest way to adapt is to change the control system of the robot, but for increasingly complex…
Evolution sculpts both the body plans and nervous systems of agents together over time. In contrast, in AI and robotics, a robot's body plan is usually designed by hand, and control policies are then optimized for that fixed design. The…
In evolutionary robotics, robot morphologies are designed automatically using evolutionary algorithms. This creates a body-brain optimization problem, where both morphology and control must be optimized together. A common approach is to…
Continuous Goal-Directed Actions (CGDA) is a robot imitation framework that encodes actions as the changes they produce on the environment. While it presents numerous advantages with respect to other robot imitation frameworks in terms of…
We combine MAP-Elites and highly parallelisable simulation to explore the design space of a class of large legged robots, which stand at around 2m tall and whose design and construction is not well-studied. The simulation is modified to…
Evolutionary algorithms have been frequently applied to constrained continuous optimisation problems. We carry out feature based comparisons of different types of evolutionary algorithms such as evolution strategies, differential evolution…
Building structures can allow a robot to surmount large obstacles, expanding the set of areas it can reach. This paper presents a planning algorithm to automatically determine what structures a construction-capable robot must build in order…
Optimizing gait stability for legged robots is a difficult problem. Even on level surfaces, effectively traversing across different textures (e.g., carpet) rests on dynamically tuning parameters in multidimensional space. Inspired by…
Biological lifeforms can heal, grow, adapt, and reproduce -- abilities essential for sustained survival and development. In contrast, robots today are primarily monolithic machines with limited ability to self-repair, physically develop, or…
With this paper, we contribute to the growing research area of feature-based analysis of bio-inspired computing. In this research area, problem instances are classified according to different features of the underlying problem in terms of…
Exposing an Evolutionary Algorithm that is used to evolve robot controllers to variable conditions is necessary to obtain solutions which are robust and can cross the reality gap. However, we do not yet have methods for analyzing and…
Industrial robots are designed as general-purpose hardware with limited ability to adapt to changing task requirements or environments. Modular robots, on the other hand, offer flexibility and can be easily customized to suit diverse needs.…