Towards the targeted environment-specific evolution of robot components

Jack Collins, Wade Geles, David Howard, Frederic Maire
2018 Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference on - GECCO '18  
This research considers the task of evolving the physical structure of a robot to enhance its performance in various environments, which is a significant problem in the field of Evolutionary Robotics. Inspired by the fields of evolutionary art and sculpture, we evolve only targeted parts of a robot, which simplifies the optimisation problem compared to traditional approaches that must simultaneously evolve both (actuated) body and brain. Exploration fidelity is emphasised in areas of the robot
more » ... ost likely to benefit from shape optimisation, whilst exploiting existing robot structure and control. Our approach uses a Genetic Algorithm to optimise collections of Bezier splines that together define the shape of a legged robot's tibia, and leg performance is evaluated in parallel in a high-fidelity simulator. The leg is represented in the simulator as 3D-printable file, and as such can be readily instantiated in reality. Provisional experiments in three distinct environments show the evolution of environment-specific leg structures that are both high-performing and notably different to those evolved in the other environments. This proof-of-concept represents an important step towards the environment-dependent optimisation of performance-critical components for a range of ubiquitous, standard, and already-capable robots that can carry out a wide variety of tasks.
doi:10.1145/3205455.3205541 dblp:conf/gecco/CollinsGHM18 fatcat:tfyp5l5dwrbc7g4vcn43ayisz4