TY - GEN
T1 - Unconventional Hexacopters via Evolution and Learning
T2 - 29th European Conference on Applications of Evolutionary Computation, EvoApplications 2026, held as part of EvoStar 2026
AU - Muff, Jed R.
AU - Ito, Keiichi
AU - Ang, Elijah H.W.
AU - Miras, Karine
AU - Eiben, A. E.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026.
PY - 2026
Y1 - 2026
N2 - This study investigates a system of hexacopter type drones with evolvable morphologies and learnable controllers. The combination of morphological evolution and reinforcement learning is shown to produce unconventional drones that significantly outperform the traditional hexacopter on several tasks that are more complex than previously considered in the literature. In addition, novel metrics are introduced and new analyses are conducted on the interaction between morphological evolution and learning, uncovering previously unidentified effects.
AB - This study investigates a system of hexacopter type drones with evolvable morphologies and learnable controllers. The combination of morphological evolution and reinforcement learning is shown to produce unconventional drones that significantly outperform the traditional hexacopter on several tasks that are more complex than previously considered in the literature. In addition, novel metrics are introduced and new analyses are conducted on the interaction between morphological evolution and learning, uncovering previously unidentified effects.
KW - aerial robotics
KW - co-optimization
KW - evolutionary robotics
KW - lifetime learning
KW - morphological evolution
KW - reinforcement learning
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105040011381
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105040011381#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-032-23604-3_5
DO - 10.1007/978-3-032-23604-3_5
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:105040011381
SN - 9783032236036
VL - 1
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science
SP - 69
EP - 84
BT - Applications of Evolutionary Computation
A2 - García-Sánchez, Pablo
A2 - Díaz Álvarez, Josefa
A2 - Murphy, Aidan
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Y2 - 8 April 2026 through 10 April 2026
ER -