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Outputs (13)

Understanding fitness landscapes in morpho-evolution via local optima networks (2024)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Thomson, S. L., Le Goff, L., Hart, E., & Buchanan, E. (2024, July). Understanding fitness landscapes in morpho-evolution via local optima networks. Presented at Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2024), Melbourne, Australia

Morpho-Evolution (ME) refers to the simultaneous optimisation of a robot's design and controller to maximise performance given a task and environment. Many genetic encodings have been proposed which are capable of representing design and control. Pre... Read More about Understanding fitness landscapes in morpho-evolution via local optima networks.

Generalized Early Stopping in Evolutionary Direct Policy Search (2024)
Journal Article
Arza, E., Le Goff, L. K., & Hart, E. (online). Generalized Early Stopping in Evolutionary Direct Policy Search. ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization, https://doi.org/10.1145/3653024

Lengthy evaluation times are common in many optimization problems such as direct policy search tasks, especially when they involve conducting evaluations in the physical world, e.g. in robotics applications. Often when evaluating solution over a fixe... Read More about Generalized Early Stopping in Evolutionary Direct Policy Search.

Evaluation of Frameworks That Combine Evolution and Learning to Design Robots in Complex Morphological Spaces (2023)
Journal Article
Li, W., Buchanan, E., Goff, L. K. L., Hart, E., Hale, M. F., Wei, B., Carlo, M. D., Angus, M., Woolley, R., Gan, Z., Winfield, A. F., Timmis, J., Eiben, A. E., & Tyrrell, A. M. (online). Evaluation of Frameworks That Combine Evolution and Learning to Desi

Jointly optimising both the body and brain of a robot is known to be a challenging task, especially when attempting to evolve designs in simulation that will subsequently be built in the real world. To address this, it is increasingly common to combi... Read More about Evaluation of Frameworks That Combine Evolution and Learning to Design Robots in Complex Morphological Spaces.

Robotics and Autonomous Systems for Environmental Sustainability: Monitoring Terrestrial Biodiversity (2023)
Preprint / Working Paper
Pringle, S., Davies, Z. G., Goddard, M. A., Dallimer, M., Hart, E., Le Goff, L., & Langdale, S. J. (2023). Robotics and Autonomous Systems for Environmental Sustainability: Monitoring Terrestrial Biodiversity

Welcome to the UK-RAS White paper Series on Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS). This is one of the core activities of UK-RAS Network, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). By Bringing together academic centres o... Read More about Robotics and Autonomous Systems for Environmental Sustainability: Monitoring Terrestrial Biodiversity.

Practical Hardware for Evolvable Robots (2023)
Journal Article
Angus, M., Buchanan, E., Le Goff, L. K., Hart, E., Eiben, A., De Carlo, M., Winfield, A. F., Hale, M., Woolley, R., Timmis, J., & Tyrrell, A. M. (2023). Practical Hardware for Evolvable Robots. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 10, Article 1206055. https://do

The evolutionary robotics field offers the possibility of autonomously generating robots that are adapted to desired tasks by iteratively optimising across successive generations of robots with varying configurations until a high-performing candidate... Read More about Practical Hardware for Evolvable Robots.

Morpho-evolution with learning using a controller archive as an inheritance mechanism (2022)
Journal Article
Le Goff, L. K., Buchanan, E., Hart, E., Eiben, A. E., Li, W., De Carlo, M., Winfield, A. F., Hale, M. F., Woolley, R., Angus, M., Timmis, J., & Tyrrell, A. M. (2023). Morpho-evolution with learning using a controller archive as an inheritance mechanism. I

Most work in evolutionary robotics centres on evolving a controller for a fixed body-plan. However, previous studiessuggest that simultaneously evolving both controller and body-plan could open up many interesting possibilities. However... Read More about Morpho-evolution with learning using a controller archive as an inheritance mechanism.

Artificial evolution of robot bodies and control: on the interaction between evolution, individual and cultural learning (2021)
Journal Article
Hart, E., & Le Goff, L. K. (2022). Artificial evolution of robot bodies and control: on the interaction between evolution, individual and cultural learning. Philosophical Transactions B: Biological Sciences, 377(1843), https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.01

We survey and reflect on evolutionary approaches to the joint optimisation of the body and control of a robot, in scenarios where a the goal is to find a design that maximises performance on a specified task. The review is grounded in a general frame... Read More about Artificial evolution of robot bodies and control: on the interaction between evolution, individual and cultural learning.

On the challenges of jointly optimising robot morphology and control using a hierarchical optimisation scheme (2021)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Goff, L. K. L., & Hart, E. (2021, July). On the challenges of jointly optimising robot morphology and control using a hierarchical optimisation scheme. Presented at GECCO '21: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Lille, France

We investigate a hierarchical scheme for the joint optimisation of robot bodies and controllers in a complex morphological space. An evolutionary algorithm optimises body-plans while a separate learning algorithm is applied to each body generated to... Read More about On the challenges of jointly optimising robot morphology and control using a hierarchical optimisation scheme.

Evolution of Diverse, Manufacturable Robot Body Plans (2020)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Buchanan, E., Le Goff, L., Hart, E., Eiben, A. E., De Carlo, M., Li, W., Hale, M. F., Angus, M., Woolley, R., Winfield, A. F., Timmis, J., & Tyrrell, A. M. (2020, December). Evolution of Diverse, Manufacturable Robot Body Plans. Presented at International

Advances in rapid prototyping have opened up new avenues of research within Evolutionary Robotics in which not only controllers but also the body plans (morphologies) of robots can evolve in real-time and real-space. However, this also introduces new... Read More about Evolution of Diverse, Manufacturable Robot Body Plans.

Hardware Design for Autonomous Robot Evolution (2020)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Hale, M. F., Angus, M., Buchanan, E., Li, W., Woolley, R., Le Goff, L. K., De Carlo, M., Timmis, J., Winfield, A. F., Hart, E., Eiben, A. E., & Tyrrell, A. M. (2020, December). Hardware Design for Autonomous Robot Evolution. Presented at International Con

The long term goal of the Autonomous Robot Evolution (ARE) project is to create populations of physical robots, in which both the controllers and body plans are evolved. The transition for evolutionary designs from purely simulation environments into... Read More about Hardware Design for Autonomous Robot Evolution.