Related papers: Heritability in Morphological Robot Evolution
Humanoid robots, as general-purpose physical agents, must integrate both intelligent control and adaptive morphology to operate effectively in diverse real-world environments. While recent research has focused primarily on optimizing…
Evolutionary robotics has aimed to optimize robot control and morphology to produce better and more robust robots. Most previous research only addresses optimization of control, and does this only in simulation. We have developed a…
The co-optimization of a robot's body and brain presents a coupled challenge: the morphology constrains which control strategies are effective, while the control determines how well the morphology performs. To address this, we combine…
We address a primary question of computational as well as biological research on evolution: How can an exploration strategy adapt in such a way as to exploit the information gained about the problem at hand? We first introduce an integrated…
Evolving morphologies and controllers of robots simultaneously leads to a problem: Even if the parents have well-matching bodies and brains, the stochastic recombination can break this match and cause a body-brain mismatch in their…
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…
For robots to handle the numerous factors that can affect them in the real world, they must adapt to changes and unexpected events. Evolutionary robotics tries to solve some of these issues by automatically optimizing a robot for a specific…
Soft robotics holds transformative potential for enabling adaptive and adaptable systems in dynamic environments. However, the interplay between morphological and control complexities and their collective impact on task performance remains…
Surrogate models are used to reduce the burden of expensive-to-evaluate objective functions in optimization. By creating models which map genomes to objective values, these models can estimate the performance of unknown inputs, and so be…
Identifying and categorizing specific robot tasks, behaviors, and resources is an essential precursor to reproducing and evaluating robotics experiments across laboratories and platforms. Without some means of capturing how one environment,…
Biological systems must be robust for stable function against perturbations, but robustness alone is not sufficient. The ability to switch between appropriate states (phenotypes) in response to different conditions is essential for…
Humans leverage multiple sensor modalities when interacting with objects and discovering their intrinsic properties. Using the visual modality alone is insufficient for deriving intuition behind object properties (e.g., which of two boxes…
A key goal in studies of ecology and evolution is understanding the causes of phenotypic diversity in nature. Most traits of interest, such as those relating to morphology, life-history, immunity and behaviour are quantitative, and…
Genotype-to-phenotype mappings translate genotypic variations such as mutations into phenotypic changes. Neutrality is the observation that some mutations do not lead to phenotypic changes. Studying the search trajectories in genotypic and…
A tumor can be thought of as an ecosystem, which critically means that we cannot just consider it as a collection of mutated cells but more as a complex system of many interacting cellular and microenvironmental elements. At its simplest, a…
Complexity in biology is often described using a multi-map architecture, where the genotype, representing the encoded information, is mapped to the functional level, known as the phenotype, which is then connected to a latent phenotype we…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
Soft robots, compared to rigid robots, possess inherent advantages, including higher degrees of freedom, compliance, and enhanced safety, which have contributed to their increasing application across various fields. Among these benefits,…
Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…
The ability of responding to environmental stimuli with appropriate actions is a property shared by all living organisms, and it is also sought in the design of robotic systems. Phenotypic plasticity provides a way for achieving this…