Autonomous Robot Evolution: Cradle to Grave

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.

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.

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.

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 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 (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 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.

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.

The ARE Robot Fabricator: How to (Re)produce Robots that Can Evolve in the Real World (2019)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Hale, M. F., Buchanan, E., Winfield, A. F., Timmis, J., Hart, E., Eiben, A. E., Angus, M., Veenstra, F., Li, W., Woolley, R., De Carlo, M., & Tyrrell, A. M. (2019, July). The ARE Robot Fabricator: How to (Re)produce Robots that Can Evolve in the Real World. Presented at Artificial Life, Newcastle, UK

The long term vision of the Autonomous Robot Evolution (ARE) project is to create an ecosystem of both virtual and physical robots with evolving brains and bodies. One of the major challenges for such a vision is the need to construct many unique ind... Read More about The ARE Robot Fabricator: How to (Re)produce Robots that Can Evolve in the Real World.

Comparing encodings for performance and phenotypic exploration in evolving modular robots (2019)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Veenstra, F., Hart, E., Buchanan, E., Li, W., De Carlo, M., & Eiben, A. E. (2019, July). Comparing encodings for performance and phenotypic exploration in evolving modular robots. Presented at GECCO '19: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Prague, Czech Republic

To investigate how encodings influence evolving the morphology and control of modular robots, we compared three encodings: a direct encoding and two generative encodings---a compositional pattern producing network (CPPN) and a Lindenmayer System (L-S... Read More about Comparing encodings for performance and phenotypic exploration in evolving modular robots.