Evolutionary robotics
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Quality Diversity: A New Frontier for Evolutionary Computation Open
While evolutionary computation and evolutionary robotics take inspiration from nature, they have long focused mainly on problems of performance optimization. Yet evolution in nature can be interpreted as more nuanced than a process of simp…
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A Differentiable Physics Engine for Deep Learning in Robotics Open
An important field in robotics is the optimization of controllers. Currently, robots are often treated as a black box in this optimization process, which is the reason why derivative-free optimization methods such as evolutionary algorithm…
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Evolution of Collective Behaviors for a Real Swarm of Aquatic Surface Robots Open
Swarm robotics is a promising approach for the coordination of large numbers of robots. While previous studies have shown that evolutionary robotics techniques can be applied to obtain robust and efficient self-organized behaviors for robo…
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Scalable co-optimization of morphology and control in embodied machines Open
Evolution sculpts both the body plans and nervous systems of agents together over time. By contrast, in artificial intelligence and robotics, a robot's body plan is usually designed by hand, and control policies are then optimized for that…
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Embodied Evolution in Collective Robotics: A Review Open
This article provides an overview of evolutionary robotics techniques applied to online distributed evolution for robot collectives, namely, embodied evolution. It provides a definition of embodied evolution as well as a thorough descripti…
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Evolutionary Modular Robotics: Survey and Analysis Open
This paper surveys various applications of artificial evolution in the field of modular robots. Evolutionary robotics aims to design autonomous adaptive robots automatically that can evolve to accomplish a specific task while adapting to e…
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Insect-Inspired Robots: Bridging Biological and Artificial Systems Open
This review article aims to address common research questions in hexapod robotics. How can we build intelligent autonomous hexapod robots that can exploit their biomechanics, morphology, and computational systems, to achieve autonomy, adap…
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The neuromechanics of animal locomotion: From biology to robotics and back Open
Robotics and neuroscience are sister disciplines that both aim to understand how agile, efficient, and robust locomotion can be achieved in autonomous agents. Robotics has already benefitted from neuromechanical principles discovered by in…
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Proximal Distilled Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning Open
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved impressive performance in many complex environments due to the integration with Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). At the same time, Genetic Algorithms (GAs), often seen as a competing approach to RL, had…
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Evolutionary Robotics Open
LIS
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Learning to grow: Control of material self-assembly using evolutionary reinforcement learning Open
We show that neural networks trained by evolutionary reinforcement learning can enact efficient molecular self-assembly protocols. Presented with molecular simulation trajectories, networks learn to change temperature and chemical potentia…
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Real-World Evolution of Robot Morphologies: A Proof of Concept Open
Evolutionary robotics using real hardware has been almost exclusively restricted to evolving robot controllers, but the technology for evolvable morphologies is advancing quickly. We discuss a proof-of-concept study to demonstrate real rob…
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Policy gradient assisted MAP-Elites Open
Quality-Diversity optimization algorithms such as MAP-Elites, aim to generate collections of both diverse and high-performing solutions to an optimization problem. MAP-Elites has shown promising results in a variety of applications. In par…
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Evolutionary Developmental Robotics: Improving Morphology and Control of Physical Robots Open
Evolutionary algorithms have previously been applied to the design of morphology and control of robots. The design space for such tasks can be very complex, which can prevent evolution from efficiently discovering fit solutions. In this ar…
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Protein engineering via Bayesian optimization-guided evolutionary algorithm and robotic experiments Open
Directed protein evolution applies repeated rounds of genetic mutagenesis and phenotypic screening and is often limited by experimental throughput. Through in silico prioritization of mutant sequences, machine learning has been applied to …
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Amphibious and Sprawling Locomotion: From Biology to Robotics and Back Open
A milestone in vertebrate evolution, the transition from water to land, owes its success to the development of a sprawling body plan that enabled an amphibious lifestyle. The body, originally adapted for swimming, evolved to benefit from l…
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Synthetic transitions: towards a new synthesis Open
The evolution of life in our biosphere has been marked by several major innovations. Such major complexity shifts include the origin of cells, genetic codes or multicellularity to the emergence of non-genetic information, language or even …
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Toward a Fourth Law of Robotics: Preserving Attribution, Responsibility, and Explainability in an Algorithmic Society Open
Jack Balkin makes several important contributions to legal theory and ethics in his lecture, “The Three Laws of Robotics in the Age of Big Data.” He proposes “laws of robotics” for an “algorithmic society” characterized by “social and econ…
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Effects of environmental conditions on evolved robot morphologies and behavior Open
This paper studies the effects of different environments on morphological and behavioral properties of evolving populations of modular robots. To assess these properties, a set of morphological and behavioral descriptors was defined and th…
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Q-Learning for Autonomous Mobile Robot Obstacle Avoidance Open
An approach to the problem of autonomous mobile robot obstacle avoidance using Reinforcement Learning, more precisely Q-Learning, is presented in this paper. Reinforcement Learning in Robotics has been a challenging topic for the past few …
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Onboard Evolution of Understandable Swarm Behaviors Open
Designing the individual robot rules that give rise to desired emergent swarm behaviors is difficult. The common method of running evolutionary algorithms off‐line to automatically discover controllers in simulation suffers from two disadv…
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Cognitive Robotics Open
The current state of the art in cognitive robotics, covering the challenges of building AI-powered intelligent robots inspired by natural cognitive systems. A novel approach to building AI-powered intelligent robots takes inspiration from …
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Environmental influences on evolvable robots Open
The field of Evolutionary Robotics addresses the challenge of automatically designing robotic systems. Furthermore, the field can also support biological investigations related to evolution. In this paper, we evolve (simulated) modular rob…
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Collaborative Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning Open
Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging control tasks. However, these methods typically struggle with achieving effective exploration and are extremely sensitive to the choice of hype…
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The Bio-Engineering Approach for Plant Investigations and Growing Robots. A Mini-Review Open
It has been 10 years since the publication of the first article looking at plants as a biomechatronic system and as model for robotics. Now, roboticists have started to look at plants differently and consider them as a model in the field o…
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Evolutionary Developmental Soft Robotics As a Framework to Study Intelligence and Adaptive Behavior in Animals and Plants Open
In this paper, a comprehensive methodology and simulation framework will be reviewed, designed in order to study the emergence of adaptive and intelligent behavior in generic soft-bodied creatures. By incorporating artificial evolutionary …
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Artificial evolution of robot bodies and control: on the interaction between evolution, learning and culture Open
We survey and reflect on how learning (in the form of individual learning and/or culture) can augment evolutionary approaches to the joint optimization of the body and control of a robot. We focus on a class of applications where the goal …
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Morphological computation in haptic sensation and interaction: from nature to robotics Open
Haptics, or the sense of touch, has played an important role in enhancing the versatility and capabilities of robots. Tasks involving unstructured or changing environments can significantly benefit from haptic sensation. The requirements o…
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Design for an Individual: Connectionist Approaches to the Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality Open
The truly surprising thing about evolution is not how it makes individuals better adapted to their environment, but how it makes individuals. All individuals are made of parts that used to be individuals themselves, e.g., multicellular org…
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Towards the targeted environment-specific evolution of robot components Open
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…