Related papers: Some Experiments on the influence of Problem Hardn…
Optimizing the body and brain of a robot is a coupled challenge: the morphology determines what control strategies are effective, while the control parameters influence how well the morphology performs. This joint optimization can be done…
Diverse studies in systems neuroscience begin with extended periods of curriculum training known as `shaping' procedures. These involve progressively studying component parts of more complex tasks, and can make the difference between…
The relationship between intelligence and evolution is bidirectional: while evolution can help evolve intelligences, the degree of intelligence itself can impact evolution (Baldwin, 1896). In the field of Evolutionary Computation, the…
Evolution and learning have historically been interrelated topics, and their interplay is attracting increased interest lately. The emerging new factor in this trend is morphological evolution, the evolution of physical forms within…
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…
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…
Legged robots have significant potential to operate in highly unstructured environments. The design of locomotion control is, however, still challenging. Currently, controllers must be either manually designed for specific robots and tasks,…
As children grow older, they develop an intuitive understanding of the physical processes around them. Their physical understanding develops in stages, moving along developmental trajectories which have been mapped out extensively in…
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…
Different subsystems of organisms adapt over many time scales, such as rapid changes in the nervous system (learning), slower morphological and neurological change over the lifetime of the organism (postnatal development), and change over…
Animals (especially humans) have an amazing ability to learn new tasks quickly, and switch between them flexibly. How brains support this ability is largely unknown, both neuroscientifically and algorithmically. One reasonable supposition…
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.…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
Learning a locomotion controller for a musculoskeletal system is challenging due to over-actuation and high-dimensional action space. While many reinforcement learning methods attempt to address this issue, they often struggle to learn…
With the rise of modern deep learning, neural networks have become an essential part of virtually every artificial intelligence system, making it difficult even to imagine different models for intelligent behavior. In contrast, nature…
The joint optimisation of body-plan and control via evolutionary processes can be challenging in rich morphological spaces in which offspring can have body-plans that are very different from either of their parents. This causes a potential…
The ongoing deep learning revolution has allowed computers to outclass humans in various games and perceive features imperceptible to humans during classification tasks. Current machine learning techniques have clearly distinguished…
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…
Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans and behaviors. It…
Evolution in nature illustrates that the creatures' biological structure and their sensorimotor skills adapt to the environmental changes for survival. Likewise, the ability to morph and acquire new skills can facilitate an embodied agent…