Search Space Analysis of Evolvable Robot Morphologies

K. da Silva Miras de Araujo*, Evert Haasdijk, Kyrre Glette, A.E. Eiben

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book / Report / Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

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Abstract

We present a study on morphological traits of evolved modular robots. We note that the evolutionary search space –the set of obtainable morphologies– depends on the given representation and reproduction operators and we propose a framework to assess morphological traits in this search space regardless of a specific environment and/or task. To this end, we present eight quantifiable morphological descriptors and a generic novelty search algorithm to produce a diverse set of morphologies for any given representation. With this machinery, we perform a comparison between a direct encoding and a generative encoding. The results demonstrate that our framework permits to find a very diverse set of bodies, allowing a morphological diversity investigation. Furthermore, the analysis showed that despite the high levels of diversity, a bias to certain traits in the population was detected. Surprisingly, the two encoding methods showed no significant difference in the diversity levels of the evolved morphologies or their morphological traits.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationApplications of Evolutionary Computation
Subtitle of host publication21st International Conference, EvoApplications 2018, Parma, Italy, April 4-6, 2018, Proceedings
EditorsKevin Sim, Paul Kaufmann
Place of PublicationCham
PublisherSpringer/Verlag
Pages703-718
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9783319775388
ISBN (Print)9783319775371
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018
Event21st International Conference on Applications of Evolutionary Computation, EvoApplications 2018 - parma, Italy
Duration: 4 Apr 20186 Apr 2018

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume10784
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference21st International Conference on Applications of Evolutionary Computation, EvoApplications 2018
Country/TerritoryItaly
Cityparma
Period4/04/186/04/18

Keywords

  • Evolutionary Robotics
  • Generative encoding
  • Modular robots
  • Morphology
  • Novelty search

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