Lee, Wei‐Po. “Evolving robot brains and bodies together: An experimental investigation.” Journal of the Chinese Institute of Engineers 26, no. 2 (2003): 125-132.
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In recent years, evolutionary algorithms have been proposed to synthesize robot controllers. However, admittedly, it is not satisfactory just to evolve the control system, because the performance of the control system depends on other hardware parameters, the robot body plan. In this paper, an evolutionary framework is presented to evolve complete robot systems, including controllers and bodies, to achieve fitness‐specified tasks. In order to assess the performance of the developed system, we use it to evolve controller and body plan together for a robot in a simulated environment to achieve an obstacle avoidance task. Experimental results show the promise of this hybrid evolutionary approach. In addition, the importance of simultaneously evolving controller and morphology is emphasized, and the distribution of body parameters in the morphological space is also studied.