Levels of dynamics and adaptive behavior in evolutionary neural controllers
ICSAB Proceedings of the seventh international conference on simulation of adaptive behavior on From animals to animats
An overview of evolutionary algorithms for parameter optimization
Evolutionary Computation
Evolution of neural organization in a hydra-like animat
ICONIP'08 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Advances in neuro-information processing - Volume Part I
ECAL'09 Proceedings of the 10th European conference on Advances in artificial life: Darwin meets von Neumann - Volume Part I
Robust simulation of lamprey tracking
PPSN'06 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature
Morphological computation: connecting brain, body, and environment
BioADIT'06 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Biologically Inspired Approaches to Advanced Information Technology
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In an animal, a crucial factor concerning the arrival of information at the sensors and subsequent transmission to the effectors, is how it is distributed. At the same time, higher animals also employ proprioceptive feedback so that their respective neural circuits have information regarding the state of the animal body. In order to disseminate what this practically means for the distribution of sensory information, we have modeled a segmented swimming organism (animat) coevolving its nervous system and body plan morphology. In a simulated aquatic environment, we find that animats artificially endowed with proprioceptive feedback are able to evolve completely decoupled central pattern generators (CPGs) meaning that they emerge without any connections made to neural circuits in adjacent body segments. Without such feedback however, we also find that the distribution of sensory information from the head of the animat becomes far more important, with adjacent CPG circuits becoming interconnected. Crucially, this demonstrates that where proprioceptive mechanisms are lacking, more effective delivery of sensory input is essential.