Crossing the fabrication gap: evolving assembly plans to build 3-D objects

Evolutionary computation has demonstrated the ability to design novel and interesting objects. Such objects are increasingly being assembled in the physical world, albeit with some difficultly. An obstacle to this assembly is that most evolved designs are descriptive representations: they specify what to build, but carry no information on how to build it. Inferring a corresponding assembly sequence for such an object is a complex task for any but the most trivial designs. We offer an alternative solution to this spectre of the fabrication gap, namely the direct evolution of assembly sequences. As we show, such methods not only lead to the evolution of buildable objects, but also lead to the emergence of novel means of assembly as well