Path towards multilevel evolution of robots

Abstract

Multi-level evolution is a bottom-up robotic design paradigm which decomposes the design problem into layered sub-tasks that involve concurrent search for appropriate materials, component geometry and overall morphology. Each of the three layers operate with the goal of building a library of diverse candidate solutions which will be used either as building blocks for the layer above or provided to the decision maker for final use. In this paper we provide a theoretical discussion on the concepts and technologies that could potentially be used as building blocks for this framework.