Bootstrapping artificial evolution to design robots for autonomous fabrication

TY - JOUR

T1 - Bootstrapping artificial evolution to design robots for autonomous fabrication

AU - Buchanan Berumen, Edgar

AU - Le Goff, Léni

AU - Li, Wei

AU - Hart, Emma

AU - Eiben, Gusz

AU - De Carlo, Matteo

AU - Winfield, Alan

AU - Hale, Matthew

AU - Woolley, Robert

AU - Timmis, Jon

AU - Tyrrell, Andy

N1 - © 2020, The Author(s).

PY - 2020/12/7

Y1 - 2020/12/7

N2 - 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. Evolutionary Robotics has been widely used due to its capability of creating unique robot designs in simulation. Recent work has shown that it is possible to autonomously construct evolved designs in the physical domain, however this brings new challenges: the autonomous manufacture and assembly process introduces new constraints that are not apparent in simulation. To tackle this, we introduce a new method for producing a repertoire of diverse but manufacturable robots. This repertoire is used to seed an evolutionary loop that subsequently evolves robot designs and controllers capable of solving a maze-navigation task. We show that compared to random initialisation, seeding with a diverse and manufacturable population speeds up convergence and on some tasks, increases performance, while maintaining manufacturability.

AB - 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. Evolutionary Robotics has been widely used due to its capability of creating unique robot designs in simulation. Recent work has shown that it is possible to autonomously construct evolved designs in the physical domain, however this brings new challenges: the autonomous manufacture and assembly process introduces new constraints that are not apparent in simulation. To tackle this, we introduce a new method for producing a repertoire of diverse but manufacturable robots. This repertoire is used to seed an evolutionary loop that subsequently evolves robot designs and controllers capable of solving a maze-navigation task. We show that compared to random initialisation, seeding with a diverse and manufacturable population speeds up convergence and on some tasks, increases performance, while maintaining manufacturability.

KW - evolutionary robotics

KW - autonomous robot evolution

KW - autonomous robot fabrication

KW - robot manufacturability

U2 - 10.3390/robotics9040106

DO - 10.3390/robotics9040106

M3 - Article

SN - 2218-6581

JO - MDPI Robotics

JF - MDPI Robotics

ER -