Evolutionary design of soft-bodied animats with decentralized control

Authors:
Michał Joachimczak;Taras Kowaliw;René Doursat;Borys Wróbel
Affiliations:
Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan and Systems Modeling Laboratory, Institute of Oceanology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Sopot, Poland;Institut des Systèmes Complexes, Paris Île-de-France (ISC-PIF), CNRS, Paris, France;Institut des Systèmes Complexes, Paris Île-de-France (ISC-PIF), CNRS, Paris, France and School of Biomedical Engineering, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA and Erasmus Mundus Masters ...;Systems Modeling Laboratory, Institute of Oceanology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Sopot, Poland and Evolutionary Systems Laboratory, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
Venue:
Artificial Life and Robotics
Year:
2013

Citing 12
Cited 0

Evolving virtual creatures

SIGGRAPH '94 Proceedings of the 21st annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Comparison of different genotype encodings for simulated three-dimensional agents

Artificial Life
Facilitating evolutionary innovation by developmental modularity and variability

Proceedings of the 11th Annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
JSEL: jamming skin enabled locomotion

IROS'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE/RSJ international conference on Intelligent robots and systems
Fully decentralized control of a soft-bodied robot inspired by true slime mold

Biological Cybernetics
Computer-automated evolution of an x-band antenna for nasa's space technology 5 mission

Evolutionary Computation
Emerged coupling of motor control and morphological development in evolution of multi-cellular animats

ECAL'09 Proceedings of the 10th European conference on Advances in artificial life: Darwin meets von Neumann - Volume Part I
Evolution of the morphology and patterning of artificial embryos: scaling the tricolour problem to the third dimension

ECAL'09 Proceedings of the 10th European conference on Advances in artificial life: Darwin meets von Neumann - Volume Part I
Autonomous Self-Reconfiguration of Modular Robots by Evolving a Hierarchical Mechanochemical Model

IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine
Co-evolution of morphology and control of soft-bodied multicellular animats

Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
Unshackling evolution: evolving soft robots with multiple materials and a powerful generative encoding

Proceedings of the 15th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
Growing and evolving soft robots

Artificial Life

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We show how a biologically inspired model of multicellular development combined with a simulated evolutionary process can be used to design the morphologies and controllers of soft-bodied virtual animats. An animat's morphology is the result of a developmental process that starts from a single cell and goes through many cell divisions, during which cells interact via simple physical rules. Every cell contains the same genome, which encodes a gene regulatory network (GRN) controlling its behavior. After the developmental stage, locomotion emerges from the coordinated activity of the GRNs across the virtual robot body. Since cells act autonomously, the behavior of the animat is generated in a truly decentralized fashion. The movement of the animat is produced by the contraction and expansion of parts of the body, caused by the cells, and is simulated using a physics engine. Our system makes possible the evolution and development of animats that can run, swim, and actively navigate toward a target in a virtual environment.