Autonomous Robot Evolution: Cradle to Grave

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.

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.