Related papers: Heritability in Morphological Robot Evolution

A robotic swarm that is required to operate for long periods in a potentially unknown environment can use both evolution and individual learning methods in order to adapt. However, the role played by the environment in influencing the…

Background: Heritability is a central measure in genetics quantifying how much of the variability observed in a trait is attributable to genetic differences. Existing methods for estimating heritability are most often based on random-effect…

Sustainability is no longer a matter of choice but is invariably linked to the survival of the entire ecosystem of our planet Earth. As robotics technology is growing at an exponential rate, it is crucial to examine its implications for…

Living species, ranging from bacteria to animals, exist in environmental conditions that exhibit spatial and temporal heterogeneity which requires them to adapt. Risk-spreading through spontaneous phenotypic variations is a known concept in…

The co-adaptation of robots has been a long-standing research endeavour with the goal of adapting both body and behaviour of a system for a given task, inspired by the natural evolution of animals. Co-adaptation has the potential to…

Phenotypic heterogeneity is a strategy commonly used by bacteria to rapidly adapt to changing environmental conditions. Here, we study the interplay between phenotypic heterogeneity and genetic diversity in spatially extended populations.…

This paper provides an overview of evolutionary robotics techniques applied to on-line distributed evolution for robot collectives -- namely, embodied evolution. It provides a definition of embodied evolution as well as a thorough…

When simulating soft robots, both their morphology and their controllers play important roles in task performance. This paper introduces a new method to co-evolve these two components in the same process. We do that by using the hyperNEAT…

Survival analysis concerns the task of predicting the time until an event occurs. Often used in the medical field, survival analysis deals with incomplete (i.e., censored) data, for instance, from patients who did not experience the event…

Mapping genotypes to phenotypes (G2P) is a fundamental goal in biology. So called PhyloG2P methods are a relatively new set of tools that leverage replicated evolution in phylogenetically independent lineages to identify genomic regions…

Prototyping robotic systems is a time consuming process. Computer aided design, however, might speed up the process significantly. Quality-diversity evolutionary approaches optimise for novelty as well as performance, and can be used to…

Robots deployed at orders of magnitude different size scales, and that retain the same desired behavior at any of those scales, would greatly expand the environments in which the robots could operate. However it is currently not known…

Discovering evolutionary traits that are heritable across species on the tree of life (also referred to as a phylogenetic tree) is of great interest to biologists to understand how organisms diversify and evolve. However, the measurement of…

The prevalence of neutral mutations implies that biological systems typically have many more genotypes than phenotypes. But can the way that genotypes are distributed over phenotypes determine evolutionary outcomes? Answering such questions…

Many experiments have been performed that use evolutionary algorithms for learning the topology and connection weights of a neural network that controls a robot or virtual agent. These experiments are not only performed to better understand…

As different research works report and daily life experiences confirm, learning models can result in biased outcomes. The biased learned models usually replicate historical discrimination in society and typically negatively affect the less…

We generalize the well-studied problem of gait learning in modular robots in two dimensions. Firstly, we address locomotion in a given target direction that goes beyond learning a typical undirected gait. Secondly, rather than studying one…

There is an intrinsic relationship between the molecular evolution in primordial period and the properties of genomes and proteomes of contemporary species. The genomic data may help us understand the driving force of evolution of life at…

The field of evolutionary robotics uses principles of natural evolution to design robots. In this paper, we study the effect of adding a new module inspired by the skeletal muscle to the existing RoboGen framework: the linear actuator.…

This paper presents a high-level conceptual framework to help orient the discussion and implementation of open-endedness in evolutionary systems. Drawing upon earlier work by Banzhaf et al., three different kinds of open-endedness are…