The Impact of Early-death on Phenotypically Plastic Robots that Evolve in Changing Environments

Miras, Karine; Cuijpers, Jim; Gülhan, Bahadir; Eiben, A. E.

doi:10.1162/isal_a_00371

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 16 publications

(26 reference statements)

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“…As an extension of this work, it might be of interest to experiment with additional representations, e.g., based on neural cellular automata, and to take into account environmental feedback [24] in development. Moreover, the concept of early mortality [16] could be introduced in our framework.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some developmental representations have become popular [14,15], but they have been mostly used for morphogenesis only. One instance of a development study has demonstrated the benefits of environmental regulation for lifetime phenotypic plasticity so that bodies and brains of robots could adapt in response to environmental changes [16,17]. Another approach experimented with reconfigurable robots that relied on manually designed bodies [18].…”

Section: Introduction and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the Schedule for Morphological Development of Evolved Modular Soft Robots

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Miras

2022

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Development is fundamental for living beings. As robots are often designed to mimic biological organisms, development is believed to be crucial for achieving successful results in robotic agents, as well. What is not clear, though, is the most appropriate scheduling for development. While in real life systems development happens mostly during the initial growth phase of organisms, it has not yet been investigated whether such assumption holds also for artificial creatures. In this paper, we employ a evolutionary approach to optimize the development-according to different representations-of Voxel-based Soft Robots (VSRs), a kind of modular robots. In our study, development consists in the addition of new voxels to the VSR, at fixed time instants, depending on the development schedule. We experiment with different schedules and show that, similarly to living organisms, artificial agents benefit from development occurring at early stages of life more than from development lasting for their entire life.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introduction and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Schedule for Morphological Development of Evolved Modular Soft Robots

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Medvet

Miras

2022

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“…However, scarce attention has been paid to the environmental regulation of phenotypic plasticity. Whereas only a few examples of studies related to development and phenotypic plasticity are found in the literature [21][22][23][24][25][26][27], none of these examine the costs of plasticity. Here, a hypothesis is posited that despite the potential of phenotypic plasticity, its benefits may be potentially undermined by plasticity-related genetic costs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Costs of phenotypic plasticity can undermine its benefits for evolvable digital organisms

Miras

2023

Preprint

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Phenotypic plasticity is usually defined as a property of individual genotypes to produce different phenotypes when exposed to different environmental conditions. While the benefits of plasticity for adaptation are well established, the costs associated with plasticity remain somewhat obscure. Understanding both why and how these costs occur could help us explain and predict the behaviour of living creatures as well as allow us to design more adaptable robotic systems. One of the challenges of conducting such investigations concerns the difficulty in isolating the effects of different types of costs and the lack of control over environmental conditions. The present study tackles these challenges by using virtual worlds (software) to investigate the environmentally regulated phenotypic plasticity of digital organisms: the experimental setup guarantees that possibly incurred genetic costs of plasticity are isolated from other plasticity-related costs. The hypothesis put forward here is that despite the potential benefits of plasticity, these benefits might be undermined by the genetic costs related to plasticity itself. This hypothesis was subsequently confirmed to be true.

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Exploring the costs of phenotypic plasticity for evolvable digital organisms

Miras

2024

Sci Rep

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Phenotypic plasticity is usually defined as a property of individual genotypes to produce different phenotypes when exposed to different environmental conditions. While the benefits of plasticity for adaptation are well established, the costs associated with plasticity remain somewhat obscure. Understanding both why and how these costs arise could help us explain and predict the behavior of living creatures as well as allow the design of more adaptable robotic systems. One of the challenges of conducting such investigations concerns the difficulty of isolating the effects of different types of costs and the lack of control over environmental conditions. The present study addresses these challenges by using virtual worlds (software) to investigate the environmentally regulated phenotypic plasticity of digital organisms. The experimental setup guarantees that potential genetic costs of plasticity are isolated from other plasticity-related costs. Multiple populations of organisms endowed with and without phenotypic plasticity in either the body or the brain are evolved in simulation, and organisms must cope with different environmental conditions. The traits and fitness of the emergent organisms are compared, demonstrating cases in which plasticity is beneficial and cases in which it is neutral. The hypothesis put forward here is that the potential benefits of plasticity might be undermined by the genetic costs related to plasticity itself. The results suggest that this hypothesis is true, while further research is needed to guarantee that the observed effects unequivocally derive from genetic costs and not from some other (unforeseen) mechanism related to plasticity.

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The Impact of Early-death on Phenotypically Plastic Robots that Evolve in Changing Environments

Cited by 3 publications

References 16 publications

On the Schedule for Morphological Development of Evolved Modular Soft Robots

On the Schedule for Morphological Development of Evolved Modular Soft Robots

Costs of phenotypic plasticity can undermine its benefits for evolvable digital organisms

Exploring the costs of phenotypic plasticity for evolvable digital organisms

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