Outputs (7)

’Bots on the Ground vs Boots on the Ground: The Future of Robots in Terrestrial Ecological Surveying (2025)
Journal Article
White, P., Le Goff, L., Emery, L., Abrahams, C., Findlay, M., Cook, J., Macleod, K., Deacon, L., Reason, P., Stanhope, K., Wale, M., Hart, E., & Diele, K. (2025). ’Bots on the Ground vs Boots on the Ground: The Future of Robots in Terrestrial Ecological Surveying. In Practice (CIEEM), 27, 47-52

At the 2023 CIEEM Modernising Ecology conference, a robot greeted the attendees as they arrived. Was it a glimpse into the future? As with other technologies, robots have the potential to revolutionise ecological surveying, yet this comes with both o... Read More about ’Bots on the Ground vs Boots on the Ground: The Future of Robots in Terrestrial Ecological Surveying.

Improving Efficiency of Evolving Robot Designs via Self-Adaptive Learning Cycles and an Asynchronous Architecture (2024)
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.

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. (2024). Evaluation of Frameworks That Combine Evolution and Learning to Design Robots in Complex Morphological Spaces. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 28(6), 1561 - 1574. 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.

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.

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.