Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Bootstrapping artificial evolution to design robots for autonomous fabrication

Buchanan, Edgar; Le Goff, L�ni K.; Li, Wei; Hart, Emma; Eiben, Agoston E.; De Carlo, Matteo; Winfield, Alan F.; Hale, Matthew F.; Woolley, Robert; Angus, Mike; Timmis, Jon; Tyrrell, Andy M.

Authors

Edgar Buchanan

L�ni K. Le Goff

Wei Li

Emma Hart

Agoston E. Eiben

Matteo De Carlo

Matthew F. Hale

Robert Woolley

Mike Angus

Jon Timmis

Andy M. Tyrrell



Abstract

A long-term vision of evolutionary robotics is a technology enabling the evolution of entire autonomous robotic ecosystems that live and work for long periods in challenging and dynamic environments without the need for direct human oversight. Evolutionary robotics has been widely used due to its capability of creating unique robot designs in simulation. Recent work has shown that it is possible to autonomously construct evolved designs in the physical domain; however, this brings new challenges: the autonomous manufacture and assembly process introduces new constraints that are not apparent in simulation. To tackle this, we introduce a new method for producing a repertoire of diverse but manufacturable robots. This repertoire is used to seed an evolutionary loop that subsequently evolves robot designs and controllers capable of solving a maze-navigation task. We show that compared to random initialisation, seeding with a diverse and manufacturable population speeds up convergence and on some tasks, increases performance, while maintaining manufacturability.

Citation

Buchanan, E., Le Goff, L. K., Li, W., Hart, E., Eiben, A. E., De Carlo, M., …Tyrrell, A. M. (2020). Bootstrapping artificial evolution to design robots for autonomous fabrication. Robotics, 9(4), Article 106. https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics9040106

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Dec 2, 2020
Online Publication Date Dec 7, 2020
Publication Date Dec 7, 2020
Deposit Date Jun 27, 2021
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Robotics
Electronic ISSN 2218-6581
Publisher MDPI
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 9
Issue 4
Article Number 106
DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics9040106
Public URL https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/7494900

Files




You might also like



Downloadable Citations