Hardware Design for Autonomous Robot Evolution

Hale, Matthew F.; Angus, Mike; Buchanan, Edgar; Li, Wei; Woolley, Robert; Le Goff, Léni K.; De Carlo, Matteo; Timmis, Jon; Winfield, Alan F.; Hart, Emma; Eiben, Agoston E.; Tyrrell, Andy M.

Abstract

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 the real world creates the possibility for new types of system able to adapt to unknown and changing environments. In this paper, a system for creating robots is introduced in order to allow for their body plans to be designed algorithmically and physically instantiated using the previously introduced Robot Fabricator. This system consists of two types of components. Firstly, skeleton parts are created bespoke for each design by 3D printing, allowing the overall shape of the robot to include almost infinite variety. To allow for the shortcomings of 3D printing, the second type of component are organs which contain components such as motors and sensors, and can be attached to the skeleton to provide particular functions. Specific organ designs are presented, with discussion of the design challenges for evolutionary robotics in hardware. The Robot Fabricator is extended to allow for robots with joints, and some example body plans shown to demonstrate the diversity possible using this system of robot generation.

Citation

Hale, M. F., Angus, M., Buchanan, E., Li, W., Woolley, R., Le Goff, L. K., …Tyrrell, A. M. (2020). Hardware Design for Autonomous Robot Evolution. In 2020 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI) (2140-2147). https://doi.org/10.1109/SSCI47803.2020.9308204

• Conference Name: International Conference on Evolvable Hardware
• Conference Location: Canberra Australia
• Start Date: Dec 1, 2020
• End Date: Nov 4, 2020
• Acceptance Date: Sep 18, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Jan 5, 2021
• Publication Date: 2020
• Deposit Date: Nov 25, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 26, 2020
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Pages: 2140-2147
• Series Title: IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence
• Book Title: 2020 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI)
• ISBN: 978-1-7281-2548-0
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/SSCI47803.2020.9308204
• Keywords: robotics, evolution, evolutionary robotics, evolution in hardware
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2705386