Evolutionary robotics is an embodied approach to

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...

(AI) in which

robots "\n\n\n\n\nThe robots exclusion standard, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or simply robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the site they are allowed to visi ...

are automatically designed using

Darwinian Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that ...

principles of

natural selection Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Cha ...

. 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 A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Simulations require the use of models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or process, whereas the s ...

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, m ...

and/or combinations of the better designs. This

evolutionary algorithm In computational intelligence (CI), an evolutionary algorithm (EA) is a subset of evolutionary computation, a generic population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithm. An EA uses mechanisms inspired by biological evolution, such as reproduct ...

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 and Francesco Mondada at EPFL evolved controllers for the Khepera robot. Adrian Thompson, Nick Jakobi,

Dave Cliff Dave Cliff (born 25 June 1944) is a British jazz guitarist. Career Cliff was born in Hexham, Northumberland. In 1967, he moved to Leeds and gained a diploma in jazz studies from Leeds College of Music while studying with bassist Peter Ind an ...

, Inman Harvey, and Phil Husbands evolved controllers for a Gantry robot at the

University of Sussex , mottoeng = Be Still and Know , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £14.4 million (2020) , budget = £319.6 million (2019–20) , chancellor = Sanjeev Bhaskar , vice_chancellor = Sasha Roseneil , ...

. However the body of these robots was presupposed before evolution. The first simulations of evolved robots were reported by

Karl Sims Karl Sims (born 1962) is a computer graphics artist and researcher, who is best known for using particle systems and artificial life in computer animation. Biography Sims received a B.S. from MIT in 1984, and a M.S. from the MIT Media Lab in 1987. ...

and

Jeffrey Ventrella Jeffrey Ventrella is a digital artist, programmer, and researcher. Ventrella was principal inventor and, with Will Harvey, co-founder of the virtual world '' There''. Career Ventrella co-founded the virtual world product There.com in 1998. Ventre ...

of the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

, 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 , mottoeng = "Truth even unto its innermost parts" , established = , type = Private research university , accreditation = NECHE , president = Ronald D. Liebowitz , p ...

at the turn of the 21st century.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Evolutionary Robotics Evolutionary computation Robotics

History

See also

References