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    Environmental Adaptation of Robot Morphology and Control Through Real-world Evolution

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    1902542.pdf (1.295Mb)
    Date
    2021-03-30
    Author
    Nygaard, Tønnes
    Martin, Charles Patrick
    Howard, David
    Tørresen, Jim
    Glette, Kyrre
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    Abstract
    Robots operating in the real world will experience a range of different environments and tasks. It is essential for the robot to have the ability to adapt to its surroundings to work efficiently in changing conditions. Evolutionary robotics aims to solve this by optimizing both the control and body (morphology) of a robot, allowing adaptation to internal, as well as external factors. Most work in this field has been done in physics simulators, which are relatively simple and not able to replicate the richness of interactions found in the real world. Solutions that rely on the complex interplay between control, body, and environment are therefore rarely found. In this paper, we rely solely on real-world evaluations and apply evolutionary search to yield combinations of morphology and control for our mechanically self-reconfiguring quadruped robot. We evolve solutions on two distinct physical surfaces and analyze the results in terms of both control and morphology. We then transition to two previously unseen surfaces to demonstrate the generality of our method. We find that the evolutionary search finds high-performing and diverse morphology-controller configurations by adapting both control and body to the different properties of the physical environments. We additionally find that morphology and control vary with statistical significance between the environments. Moreover, we observe that our method allows for morphology and control parameters to transfer to previously-unseen terrains, demonstrating the generality of our approach.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12242/2921
    DOI
    10.1162/evco_a_00291
    Description
    Nygaard, Tønnes; Martin, Charles Patrick; Howard, David; Tørresen, Jim; Glette, Kyrre. Environmental Adaptation of Robot Morphology and Control Through Real-world Evolution. Evolutionary Computation 2021
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