All Outputs (15)

Towards a Unified Framework for Software-Hardware Integration in Evolutionary Robotics (2024)
Journal Article
Buchanan, E., Le Goff, L. K., Hale, M. F., Hart, E., Eiben, A. E., De Carlo, M., Angus, M., Woolley, R., Timmis, J., Winfield, A. F., & Tyrrell, A. M. (2024). Towards a Unified Framework for Software-Hardware Integration in Evolutionary Robotics. Robotics, 13(11), Article 157. https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics13110157

The discrepancy between simulated and hardware experiments, the reality gap, is a challenge in evolutionary robotics. While strategies have been proposed to address this gap in fixed-body robots, they are not viable when dealing with populations and... Read More about Towards a Unified Framework for Software-Hardware Integration in Evolutionary Robotics.

Generalized Early Stopping in Evolutionary Direct Policy Search (2024)
Journal Article
Arza, E., Le Goff, L. K., & Hart, E. (2024). Generalized Early Stopping in Evolutionary Direct Policy Search. ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization, 4(3), Article 14. 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 Design Robots in Complex Morphological Spaces. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, https://doi.org/10.1109/tevc.2023.3316363

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. 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://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2023.1206055

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. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 15(2), 507-517. https://doi.org/10.1109/tcds.2022.3148543

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.2021.0117

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.

Bootstrapping artificial evolution to design robots for autonomous fabrication (2020)
Journal Article
Buchanan, E., Le Goff, L. K., Li, W., Hart, E., Eiben, A. E., De Carlo, M., Winfield, A., Hale, M. F., Woolley, R., Angus, M., Timmis, J., & Tyrrell, A. M. (2020). Bootstrapping artificial evolution to design robots for autonomous fabrication. Robotics, 9(4), Article 106. https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics9040106

A long-term vision of evolutionary robotics is a technology enabling the evolution of entire autonomous robotic ecosystems that live and work for long periods in challenging and dynamic environments without the need for direct human oversight. Evolut... Read More about Bootstrapping artificial evolution to design robots for autonomous fabrication.

Sample and time efficient policy learning with CMA-ES and Bayesian Optimisation
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Le Goff, L. K., Buchanan, E., Hart, E., Eiben, A. E., Li, W., De Carlo, M., Hale, M. F., Angus, M., Woolley, R., Timmis, J., Winfield, A., & Tyrrell, A. M. (2020, July). Sample and time efficient policy learning with CMA-ES and Bayesian Optimisation. Presented at ALife 2020, Online

In evolutionary robot systems where morphologies and controllers of real robots are simultaneously evolved, it is clear that there is likely to be requirements to refine the inherited controller of a 'newborn' robot in order to better align it to its... Read More about Sample and time efficient policy learning with CMA-ES and Bayesian Optimisation.

On Pros and Cons of Evolving Topologies with Novelty Search
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Le Goff, L. K., Hart, E., Coninx, A., & Doncieux, S. (2020, July). On Pros and Cons of Evolving Topologies with Novelty Search. Presented at ALIFE 2020: The 2020 Conference on Artificial Life, Online

Novelty search was proposed as a means of circumventing deception and providing selective pressure towards novel behaviours to provide a path towards open-ended evolution. Initial implementations relied on neuro-evolution approaches which increased n... Read More about On Pros and Cons of Evolving Topologies with Novelty Search.

Evolution of Diverse, Manufacturable Robot Body Plans
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 Conference on Evolvable Systems (ICES), Canberra, Australia

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
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 Conference on Evolvable Hardware, Canberra Australia

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.

On the challenges of jointly optimising robot morphology and control using a hierarchical optimisation scheme
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.

Understanding fitness landscapes in morpho-evolution via local optima networks
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.

Improving Efficiency of Evolving Robot Designs via Self-Adaptive Learning Cycles and an Asynchronous Architecture
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Le Goff, L., & Hart, E. (2024, July). Improving Efficiency of Evolving Robot Designs via Self-Adaptive Learning Cycles and an Asynchronous Architecture. Presented at GECCO 2024 Embodied and Evolved Artificial Intelligence Workshop, Melbourne, Australia

Algorithmic frameworks for the joint optimisation of a robot's design and controller often utilise a learning loop nested within an evolutionary algorithm to refine the controller associated with a newly generated robot design. Intuitively, it is rea... Read More about Improving Efficiency of Evolving Robot Designs via Self-Adaptive Learning Cycles and an Asynchronous Architecture.