The challenge of robotic reproduction-making of new robots by recombining two existing ones-has been recently cracked and physically evolving robot systems have come within reach. Here we address the next big hurdle: ...
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The challenge of robotic reproduction-making of new robots by recombining two existing ones-has been recently cracked and physically evolving robot systems have come within reach. Here we address the next big hurdle: producing an adequate brain for a newborn robot. In particular, we address the task of targeted locomotion which is arguably a fundamental skill in any practical implementation. We intro-duce a controller architecture and a generic learning method to allow a modular robot with an arbitrary shape to learn to walk towards a target and follow this target if it moves. Our approach is validated on three robots, a spider, a gecko, and their offspring, in three real-world scenarios. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// ***/licenses/by/4.0/).
In this article, the concept of a cellular robot that is capable of reconfiguring itself is reviewed. This "self-reconfigurable (SR) robot" exemplifies a new trend in robotics, indeed, we can now build vario...
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In this article, the concept of a cellular robot that is capable of reconfiguring itself is reviewed. This "self-reconfigurable (SR) robot" exemplifies a new trend in robotics, indeed, we can now build various kinds of SR robots with off-the-shelf technologies of processors, actuators, and sensors. These SR robots, based on modern mechatronics, are still not as adaptable as the liquid metal robot in The Terminator 2 but are just as flexible as any conventional robots
Most work in evolutionary robotics centers on evolving a controller for a fixed body plan. However, previous studies suggest that simultaneously evolving both controller and body plan could open up many interesting po...
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Most work in evolutionary robotics centers on evolving a controller for a fixed body plan. However, previous studies suggest that simultaneously evolving both controller and body plan could open up many interesting possibilities. However, the joint optimization of body plan and control via evolutionary processes can be challenging in rich morphological spaces. This is because offspring can have body plans that are very different from either of their parents, leading to a potential mismatch between the structure of an inherited neural controller and the new body. To address this, we propose a framework that combines an evolutionary algorithm to generate body plans and a learning algorithm to optimize the parameters of a neural controller. The topology of this controller is created once the body plan of each offspring has been generated. The key novelty of the approach is to add an external archive for storing learned controllers that map to explicit "types" of robots (where this is defined with respect to the features of the body plan). By initiating learning from a controller with an appropriate structure inherited from the archive, rather than from a randomly initialized one, we show that both the speed and magnitude of learning increase over time when compared to an approach that starts from scratch, using two tasks and three environments. The framework also provides new insights into the complex interactions between evolution and learning.
A central aim of robotics research is to design robots that can perform in the real world;a real world that is often highly changeable in nature. An important challenge for researchers is therefore to produce robots t...
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A central aim of robotics research is to design robots that can perform in the real world;a real world that is often highly changeable in nature. An important challenge for researchers is therefore to produce robots that can improve their performance when the environment is stable, and adapt when the environment changes. This paper reports on experiments which show how evolutionary methods can provide lifelong adaptation for robots, and how this evolutionary process was embodied on the robot itself. A unique combination of training and lifelong adaptation are used, and this paper highlights the importance of training to this approach.
Building robots is generally considered difficult, because the designer not only has to predict the interactions between the robot and the environment, but also has to deal with the consequent problems. In recent year...
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Building robots is generally considered difficult, because the designer not only has to predict the interactions between the robot and the environment, but also has to deal with the consequent problems. In recent years, evolutionary algorithms have been proposed to synthesize robot controllers. However, admittedly, it is not satisfactory enough just to evolve the control system, because the performance of the control system depends on other hardware parameters - the robot body plan - which might include body size, wheel radius, motor time constant, etc. Therefore, the robot body plan itself should, ideally, also adapt to the task that the evolved robot is expected to accomplish. In this paper, a hybrid GP/GA framework is presented to evolve complete robot systems, including controllers and bodies, to achieve fitness-specified tasks. In order to assess the performance of the developed system, we use it with a fixed robot body plan to evolve controllers for a variety of tasks at first, then to evolve complete robot systems. Experimental results show the promise of our system.
Recently, a new approach involving a form of simulated evolution has been proposed to build autonomous robots. However, it is still not clear if this approach is adequate for real life problems. In this paper we show ...
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Recently, a new approach involving a form of simulated evolution has been proposed to build autonomous robots. However, it is still not clear if this approach is adequate for real life problems. In this paper we show how control systems that perform a non-trivial sequence of behaviors can be obtained with this methodology by "canalizing" the evolutionary process in the right direction. In the experiment described in the paper, a mobile robot was successfully trained to keep clear an arena surrounded by walls by locating, recognizing, and grasping "garbage" objects and by taking collected objects outside the arena. The controller of the robot was evolved in simulation and then downloaded and tested on the real robot. We also show that while a given amount of supervision may canalize the evolutionary process in the right direction the addition of unnecessary constraints can delay the evolution of the desired behavior. Copyright (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.
A challenging task that must be accomplished for every legged robot is creating the walking and running behaviors needed for it to move. In this paper we describe our system for autonomously evolving dynamic gaits on ...
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A challenging task that must be accomplished for every legged robot is creating the walking and running behaviors needed for it to move. In this paper we describe our system for autonomously evolving dynamic gaits on two of Sony's quadruped robots. Our evolutionary algorithm runs on board the robot and uses the robot's sensors to compute the quality of a gait without assistance from the experimenter. First, we show the evolution of a pace and trot gait on the OPEN-R prototype robot. With the fastest gait, the robot moves at over 10 m/min, which is more than forty body-lengths/min. While these first gaits are somewhat sensitive to the robot and environment in which they are evolved, we then show the evolution of robust dynamic gaits, one of which is used on the ERS-110, the first consumer version of AIBO.
Due to the lack of systematic empirical analyses and comparisons of ideas and methods, a clearly established state of the art is still missing in the optimization-based design of robot swarms. In this article, we prop...
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Due to the lack of systematic empirical analyses and comparisons of ideas and methods, a clearly established state of the art is still missing in the optimization-based design of robot swarms. In this article, we propose an experimental protocol for the comparison of fully automatic design methods. This protocol is characterized by two notable elements: 1) a way to define benchmarks for the evaluation and comparison of design methods and 2) a sampling strategy that minimizes the variance when estimating their expected performance. To define generally applicable benchmarks, we introduce the notion of mission generator: a tool to generate missions that mimic those a design method will eventually have to solve. To minimize the variance of the performance estimation, we show that, under some common assumptions, one should adopt the sampling strategy that maximizes the number of missions considered-a formal proof is provided as the supplementary material. We illustrate the experimental protocol by comparing the performance of two offline fully automatic design methods that were presented in previous publications.
evolutionary robotics using real hardware is currently restricted to evolving robot controllers, but the technology for evolvable morphologies is advancing quickly. Rapid prototyping (3D printing) and automated assemb...
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evolutionary robotics using real hardware is currently restricted to evolving robot controllers, but the technology for evolvable morphologies is advancing quickly. Rapid prototyping (3D printing) and automated assembly are the main enablers of robotic systems where robot offspring can be produced based on a blueprint that specifies the morphologies and the controllers of the parents. This article addresses the problem of gait learning in newborn robots whose morphology is unknown in advance. We investigate a reinforcement learning method and conduct simulation experiments using robot morphologies with different size and complexity. We establish that reinforcement learning does the job well and that it outperforms two alternative algorithms. The experiments also give insights into the online dynamics of gait learning and into the influence of the size, shape, and morphological complexity of the modular robots. These insights can potentially be used to predict the viability of modular robotic organisms before they are constructed.
The embodied and situated view of cognition stresses the importance of real-time and nonlinear bodily interaction with the environment for developing concepts and structuring knowledge. In this article, populations of...
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The embodied and situated view of cognition stresses the importance of real-time and nonlinear bodily interaction with the environment for developing concepts and structuring knowledge. In this article, populations of robots controlled by an artificial neural network learn a wall-following task through artificial evolution. At the end of the evolutionary process, time series are recorded from perceptual and motor neurons of selected robots. Information-theoretic measures are estimated on pairings of variables to unveil nonlinear interactions that structure the agent-environment system. Specifically, the mutual information is utilized to quantify the degree of dependence and the transfer entropy to detect the direction of the information flow. Furthermore, the system is analyzed with the local form of such measures, thus capturing the underlying dynamics of information. Results show that different measures are interdependent and complementary in uncovering aspects of the robots' interaction with the environment, as well as characteristics of the functional neural structure. Therefore, the set of information-theoretic measures provides a decomposition of the system, capturing the intricacy of nonlinear relationships that characterize robots' behavior and neural dynamics. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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