Title :
Evolving robot morphology
Author :
Lund, Henrik Hautop ; Hallam, John ; Lee, Wei-Po
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh Univ., UK
Abstract :
True evolvable hardware should evolve whole hardware structures. In robotics, it is not enough only to evolve the control circuit; the performance of the control circuit is dependent on other hardware parameters-the robot body plan, which might include body size, wheel radius, motor time constant, sensors, etc. Both the control circuit and the body plan co-evolve in true evolvable hardware. By including the robot body plan in the genotype as a kind of Hox gene, we co-evolve task-fulfilling behaviors and body plans, and we study the distribution of body parameters in the morphological space. Further, we have developed a new hardware module for the Khepera robot, namely ears with programmable amplifiers, synthesizers and mixers, that allow us to study true evolvable hardware by modelling the evolution of auditory sensor morphology
Keywords :
adaptive systems; amplifiers; electric sensing devices; genetic algorithms; mathematical morphology; robots; Hox gene; Khepera robot; auditory sensor morphology; body parameter distribution; body size; coevolution; control circuit performance; ears; evolvable hardware; genotype; hardware module; hardware parameters; hardware structures; mixers; motor time constant; programmable amplifiers; robot body plan; robot morphology evolution; synthesizers; task-fulfilling behaviors; wheel radius; Circuits; Ear; Hardware; Mobile robots; Morphology; Orbital robotics; Robot sensing systems; Size control; Synthesizers; Wheels;
Conference_Titel :
Evolutionary Computation, 1997., IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Indianapolis, IN
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-3949-5
DOI :
10.1109/ICEC.1997.592295