Watson, Richard A., S. G. Ficiei, and Jordan B. Pollack. “Embodied evolution: Embodying an evolutionary algorithm in a population of robots.” In Proceedings of the 1999 Congress on Evolutionary Computation-CEC99 (Cat. No. 99TH8406) , vol. 1, pp. 335-342. IEEE, 1999.
URL1 URL2
We introduce Embodied Evolution (EE) as a methodology for the automatic design of robotic controllers. EE is an evolutionary robotics (ER) technique that avoids the pitfalls of the simulate-and-transfer method, allows the speed-up of evaluation time by utilizing parallelism, and is particularly suited to future work on multi-agent behaviors. In EE, an evolutionary algorithm is distributed amongst and embodied within a population of physical robots that reproduce with one another while situated in the task environment. We have built a population of eight robots and successfully implemented our first experiments. The controllers evolved by EE compare favorably to hand-designed solutions for a simple task. We detail our methodology, report our initial results, and discuss the application of EE to more advanced and distributed robotics tasks.