The algorithmic beauty of plants
The algorithmic beauty of plants
SIGGRAPH '94 Proceedings of the 21st annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Three generations of automatically designed robots
Artificial Life
EH '99 Proceedings of the 1st NASA/DOD workshop on Evolvable Hardware
A Taxonomy for artificial embryogeny
Artificial Life
Evolving modular genetic regulatory networks
CEC '02 Proceedings of the Evolutionary Computation on 2002. CEC '02. Proceedings of the 2002 Congress - Volume 02
Automated discovery and optimization of large irregular tensegrity structures
Computers and Structures
Accelerating evolutionary computation with graphics processing units
Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference Companion on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference: Late Breaking Papers
Morphological evolution of freeform robots
Proceedings of the 12th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
Automated re-invention of a previously patented optical lens system using genetic programming
EuroGP'05 Proceedings of the 8th European conference on Genetic Programming
Evolutionary design of soft-bodied animats with decentralized control
Artificial Life and Robotics
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Completely soft and flexible robots offer to revolutionize fields ranging from search and rescue to endoscopic surgery. One of the outstanding challenges in this burgeoning field is the chicken-and-egg problem of body-brain design: Development of locomotion requires the preexistence of a locomotion-capable body, and development of a location-capable body requires the preexistence of a locomotive gait. This problem is compounded by the high degree of coupling between the material properties of a soft body such as stiffness or damping coefficients and the effectiveness of a gait. This article synthesizes four years of research into soft robotics, in particular describing three approaches to the co-discovery of soft robot morphology and control. In the first, muscle placement and firing patterns are coevolved for a fixed body shape with fixed material properties. In the second, the material properties of a simulated soft body coevolve alongside locomotive gaits, with body shape and muscle placement fixed. In the third, a developmental encoding is used to scalably grow elaborate soft body shapes from a small seed structure. Considerations of the simulation time and the challenges of physically implementing soft robots in the real world are discussed.