Evolution of Diverse, Manufacturable Robot Body Plans

Abstract

Advances in rapid prototyping have opened up new avenues of research within Evolutionary Robotics in which not only controllers but also the body plans (morphologies) of robots can evolve in real-time and real-space. However, this also introduces new challenges, in that robot models that can be instantiated from an encoding in simulation might not be manufacturable in practice (due to constraints associated with the 3D printing and/or automated assembly processes). We introduce a representation for evolving (wheeled) robots with a printed plastic skeleton, and evaluate three variants of a novelty-search algorithm in terms of their ability to produce populations of manufacturable but diverse robots. While the set of manufacturable robots discovered represent only a small fraction of the overall search space of all robots, all methods are shown to be capable of generating a diverse population of manufacturable robots that we conjecture is large enough to seed an evolving robotic ecosystem.

Bootstrapping Artificial Evolution to Design Robots for Autonomous Fabrication

“…This paper extends the results from [9] by investigating additional alternative descriptors to determine which descriptor is most efficient.…”

“…Novelty is measured by comparing a descriptor vector (which describes the body plan represented by an individual) with the descriptors of both the current population and those maintained in an archive produced by the same algorithm and described below (more details in Appendix A):. In this paper we extend the work in [9] where body plans were evolved for a single descriptor. For this paper three different descriptors are compared: the feature descriptor, symmetry descriptor and the spatial descriptor.…”

“…The body plan generation used in this paper is a variation of the one introduced in [9]. The robots have two types of components: skeleton and organs.…”

“…The ARE project works with complex autonomous robots with several different components, including a CPU, actuators, sensors and 3D printed complex shapes. The challenges of autonomous fabrication of robots in ARE have been highlighted in [2,8,9] where the Robot Fabricator (the machine that fabricates robots) imposes different constraints in 3D printing and autonomous assembly.…”

EMERGE Modular Robot: A Tool for Fast Deployment of Evolved Robots

“…They used 3D printing to manufacture the mechanical parts and manually assembled the motors and wires. Similarly, Samuelsen and Glette (2015); Auerbach et al (2014); Vujovic et al (2017); Buchanan et al (2020) also used 3D printing for manufacturing evolved robots. Surprisingly though, many works that use 3D printing limit the kind of shapes that can be created or modified inside the robots.…”