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All Outputs (12)

Generalized Early Stopping in Evolutionary Direct Policy Search (2024)
Journal Article
Arza, E., Le Goff, L. K., & Hart, E. (in press). 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., …Tyrrell, A. M. (in press). 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)
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., …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., …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.

On the challenges of jointly optimising robot morphology and control using a hierarchical optimisation scheme (2021)
Conference Proceeding
Goff, L. K. L., & Hart, E. (2021). On the challenges of jointly optimising robot morphology and control using a hierarchical optimisation scheme. In GECCO '21: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion (1498-1502). https://doi.org/10.1145/3449726.3463156

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)
Conference Proceeding
Buchanan, E., Le Goff, L., Hart, E., Eiben, A. E., De Carlo, M., Li, W., …Tyrrell, A. M. (2020). Evolution of Diverse, Manufacturable Robot Body Plans. In 2020 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI) (2132-2139). https://doi.org/10.1109/SSCI47803.2020.9308434

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)
Conference Proceeding
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

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.

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., …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.

On Pros and Cons of Evolving Topologies with Novelty Search (2020)
Conference Proceeding
Le Goff, L. K., Hart, E., Coninx, A., & Doncieux, S. (2020). On Pros and Cons of Evolving Topologies with Novelty Search. In ALIFE 2020: The 2020 Conference on Artificial Life (423-431). https://doi.org/10.1162/isal_a_00291

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.

Sample and time efficient policy learning with CMA-ES and Bayesian Optimisation (2020)
Conference Proceeding
Le Goff, L. K., Buchanan, E., Hart, E., Eiben, A. E., Li, W., De Carlo, M., …Tyrrell, A. M. (2020). Sample and time efficient policy learning with CMA-ES and Bayesian Optimisation. In ALIFE 2020: The 2020 Conference on Artificial Life (432-440). https://doi.org/10.1162/isal_a_00299

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.