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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…
In evolutionary robotics, jointly optimising the design and the controller of robots is a challenging task due to the huge complexity of the solution space formed by the possible combinations of body and controller. We focus on the…
Evolutionary Robotics and Robot Learning are two fields in robotics that aim to automatically optimize robot designs. The key difference between them lies in what is being optimized and the time scale involved. Evolutionary Robotics is a…
Evolutionary Robotics offers the possibility to design robots to solve a specific task automatically by optimizing their morphology and control together. However, this co-optimization of body and control is challenging, because controllers…
Robotic hardware designs are becoming more complex as the variety and number of on-board sensors increase and as greater computational power is provided in ever-smaller packages on-board robots. These advances in hardware, however, do not…
Robots operating in the real world will experience a range of different environments and tasks. It is essential for the robot to have the ability to adapt to its surroundings to work efficiently in changing conditions. Evolutionary robotics…
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…
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 --…
Simultaneously evolving morphologies (bodies) and controllers (brains) of robots can cause a mismatch between the inherited body and brain in the offspring. To mitigate this problem, the addition of an infant learning period by the…
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…
Evolution and learning are two of the fundamental mechanisms by which life adapts in order to survive and to transcend limitations. These biological phenomena inspired successful computational methods such as evolutionary algorithms and…
Morphological development is part of the way any human or animal learns. The learning processes starts with the morphology at birth and progresses through changing morphologies until adulthood is reached. Biologically, this seems to…
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…
This paper introduces a learning-based low-level controller for quadcopters, which adaptively controls quadcopters with significant variations in mass, size, and actuator capabilities. Our approach leverages a combination of imitation…
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…
The intertwined processes of learning and evolution in complex environmental niches have resulted in a remarkable diversity of morphological forms. Moreover, many aspects of animal intelligence are deeply embodied in these evolved…
Machine learning has long since become a keystone technology, accelerating science and applications in a broad range of domains. Consequently, the notion of applying learning methods to a particular problem set has become an established and…
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…
The design and control of winged aircraft and drones is an iterative process aimed at identifying a compromise of mission-specific costs and constraints. When agility is required, shape-shifting (morphing) drones represent an efficient…
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…