In recently published research, scientists detail a set of experiments in which robots — real, physical machines — improved themselves through a kind of digital Darwinism. The bots, each drawing from a collective "gene pool," competed with one another over multiple generations, gradually swapping genetic material in a process akin to sexual reproduction. The research article appeared in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI.
While this kind of evolutionary robotics research has been around a while, the new study presents an important step forward in assessing the evolutionary dynamics of physically embodied robots — and it suggests that we're mashing the fast-forward button on the impending robotic revolution.
Researchers from Vassar College set up an experiment in which 10 small-wheeled robots — all of them a model of the Ana BBot, manufactured by Johuco Ltd. — were issued the same task: to gather beams of light while avoiding certain obstacles. Each bot was also issued its own set of "genes" — a specific pattern of wires connected to pins on a circuit board.
Ana BBot, a mobile robot that is programmable using jumper wires to connect sensors and motors.
Credit: Jake Brawer et alIn this case, the genomes consisted of binary code that allowed for different possible wiring of the bot's hardware setup. The emerging phenotype — the physical expression of the gene — was modified in each generation by altering their wiring in accordance with the new genetic information. The process was repeated until 10 generations of robots had been created and ranked by fitness.
The researchers threw in another twist as well, based on a particular aspect of evolutionary theory. In living organisms, genomes are affected by development as well as evolution. In this context, development refers to events during a single lifetime that lead to epigenetic changes. This interplay between evolution and development is sometimes referred to as evo-devo, and it represents a discrete field of study in evolutionary developmental biology.
It gets complicated, but the upshot is that the Vassar experiment was the first to introduce developmental variations in an experiment with physical robots, according to the researchers. The core idea was to study how genetic (evolutionary) and epigenetic (developmental) factors interact in robotic evolution. Similar studies have been applied in the field of artificial intelligence and neural networks, but the Vassar team was interested in the potential future of physically embodied robots.
"For roboticists, the evo-devo challenge is to create physically embodied systems that incorporate the three scales of time and the processes inherent in each: behavior, development, and evolution," wrote project leads Jake Brawer and Aaron Hill, who authored the report with four other colleagues. "Because of the complexity of building and evolving physical robots, this is a daunting challenge in the quest for the 'evolution of things.' As an initial step toward this goal, in this paper we create a physically embodied system that allows us to examine systematically how developmental and evolutionary processes interact."
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