Evolutionary robotics is an
embodied approach to
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in which
robots are automatically designed using
Darwinian principles of
natural selection.
The design of a robot, or a subsystem of a robot such as a
neural controller, is optimized against a
behavioral goal (e.g. run as fast as possible). Usually, designs are evaluated in
simulations as fabricating thousands or millions of designs and testing them in the real world is prohibitively expensive in terms of time, money, and safety.
An evolutionary robotics experiment starts with a population of randomly generated robot designs. The worst performing designs are discarded and replaced with
mutations
In biology, a mutation is an alteration in the nucleic acid sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA. Viral genomes contain either DNA or RNA. Mutations result from errors during DNA or viral replication, mi ...
and/or
combinations of the better designs. This
evolutionary algorithm continues until a prespecified amount of time elapses or some target performance metric is surpassed.
Evolutionary robotics methods are particularly useful for engineering machines that must operate in environments in which humans have limited intuition (nanoscale, space, etc.). Evolved simulated robots can also be used as scientific tools to generate new hypotheses in biology and cognitive science, and to test old hypothesis that require experiments that have proven difficult or impossible to carry out in reality.
History
In the early 1990s, two separate European groups demonstrated different approaches to the evolution of robot control systems.
Dario Floreano
Dario Floreano (born 1964 in San Daniele del Friuli, Italy) is a Swiss-Italian roboticist and engineer. He is director of the Laboratory of Intelligent System (LIS) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland as well as ...
and
Francesco Mondada at
EPFL evolved controllers for the
Khepera robot.
Adrian Thompson, Nick Jakobi,
Dave Cliff,
Inman Harvey, and
Phil Husbands evolved controllers for a Gantry robot at the
University of Sussex.
However the body of these robots was presupposed before evolution.
The first simulations of evolved robots were reported by
Karl Sims and
Jeffrey Ventrella of the
MIT Media Lab, also in the early 1990s.
However these so-called virtual creatures never left their
simulated worlds. The first evolved robots to be built in reality were 3D-printed by
Hod Lipson and
Jordan Pollack at
Brandeis University at the turn of the 21st century.
See also
*
Bio-inspired robotics
*
Evolutionary computation
In computer science, evolutionary computation is a family of algorithms for global optimization inspired by biological evolution, and the subfield of artificial intelligence and soft computing studying these algorithms. In technical terms, they ...
References
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Evolutionary computation
Robotics