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Previous evolutionary studies demonstrated how evaluating evolving agents in variable environmental conditions enable them to develop solutions that are robust to environmental variation. We demonstrate how the robustness of the agents can…
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…
Populations of replicating entities frequently experience sudden or cyclical changes in environment. We explore the implications of this phenomenon via a environmental switching parameter in several common evolutionary dynamics models…
Evolutionary robot systems are usually affected by the properties of the environment indirectly through selection. In this paper, we present and investigate a system where the environment also has a direct effect: through regulation. We…
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…
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 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 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…
Assessing the systemic effects of uncertainty that arises from agents' partial observation of the true states of the world is critical for understanding a wide range of scenarios. Yet, previous modeling work on agent learning and…
Model generalization of the underlying dynamics is critical for achieving data efficiency when learning for robot control. This paper proposes a novel approach for learning dynamics leveraging the symmetry in the underlying robotic system,…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
Designing controllers for robot swarms is challenging, because human developers have typically no good understanding of the link between the details of a controller that governs individual robots and the swarm behavior that is an indirect…
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…
In the field of evolutionary robotics, choosing the correct encoding is very complicated, especially when robots evolve both behaviours and morphologies at the same time. With the objective of improving our understanding of the mapping…
We investigate the competing effects and relative importance of intrinsic demographic and environmental variability on the evolutionary dynamics of a stochastic two-species Lotka-Volterra model by means of Monte Carlo simulations on a…
Dormancy is a widespread adaptive strategy that enables populations to persist in fluctuating environments, yet how its benefits depend on the temporal structure of environmental variability remains unclear. We examine how dormancy…
Diversity is an important factor in evolutionary algorithms to prevent premature convergence towards a single local optimum. In order to maintain diversity throughout the process of evolution, various means exist in literature. We analyze…
Organisms result from adaptive processes interacting across different time scales. One such interaction is that between development and evolution. Models have shown that development sweeps over several traits in a single agent, sometimes…
The evolutionary balance between innate and learned behaviors is highly intricate, and different organisms have found different solutions to this problem. We hypothesize that the emergence and exact form of learning behaviors is naturally…
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…