Evolutionary Robotics: Model or Design?

Abstract

In this paper, I review recent work in evolutionary robotics (ER), and discuss the perspectives and future directions of the field. First, I propose to draw a crisp distinction between studies that exploit ER as a design methodology on the one hand, and studies that instead use ER as a modeling tool to better understand phenomena observed in biology. Such a distinction is not always that obvious in the literature, however. It is my conviction that ER would profit from an explicit commitment to one or the other approach. Indeed, I believe that the constraints imposed by the specific approach would guide the experimental design and the analysis of the results obtained, therefore reducing arbitrary choices and promoting the adoption of principled methods that are common practice in the target domain, be it within engineering or the life sciences. Additionally, this would improve dissemination and the impact of ER studies on other disciplines, leading to the establishment of ER as a valid tool either for design or modeling purposes.

AutoMoDe-Chocolate: automatic design of control software for robot swarms

“…Following the main tradition of evolutionary robotics, several studies demonstrated the possibility of designing control software in the form of a neural network (Quinn et al 2003;Baldassarre et al 2007;Trianni and Nolfi 2009;Hauert et al 2008;Groß and Dorigo 2009;Izzo et al 2014). Research studies often sway between providing an engineering solution and modeling biological systems (Trianni 2014). Notwithstanding the large number of robot swarms successfully designed via an evolutionary process, an engineering methodology for the application of evolutionary robotics is still unavailable (Trianni and Nolfi 2011).…”

Automatic Design of Communication-Based Behaviors for Robot Swarms

“…The vast majority of studies in which communication emerged from an automatic design process belong within evolutionary robotics [37,47,48]. Quinn et al [41,42] were the first to study the emergence of communication between agents.…”

Automatic Design of Robot Swarms: Achievements and Challenges

“…In the following, we present a number of notable achievements in evolutionary swarm robotics. For comprehensive reviews of the (single-robot) evolutionary robotics literature, we refer the reader to Bongard (2013), Doncieux and Mouret (2014), Trianni (2014), and Silva et al (2016).…”