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European Conference on Genetic Programming (Part of EvoStar)

EuroGP 2022: Genetic Programming pp 146–161Cite as

On the Schedule for Morphological Development of Evolved Modular Soft Robots

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13223))

Abstract

Development is fundamental for living beings. As robots are often designed to mimic biological organisms, development is believed to be crucial for achieving successful results in robotic agents, as well. What is not clear, though, is the most appropriate scheduling for development. While in real life systems development happens mostly during the initial growth phase of organisms, it has not yet been investigated whether such assumption holds also for artificial creatures. In this paper, we employ a evolutionary approach to optimize the development—according to different representations—of Voxel-based Soft Robots (VSRs), a kind of modular robots. In our study, development consists in the addition of new voxels to the VSR, at fixed time instants, depending on the development schedule. We experiment with different schedules and show that, similarly to living organisms, artificial agents benefit from development occurring at early stages of life more than from development lasting for their entire life.

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Acknowledgements

The experimental evaluation of this work has been partially supported by a Google Faculty Research Award granted to E.M.. K.M. was supported by the Hybrid Intelligence Center, a 10-year program funded by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science through the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (https://www.hybrid-intelligence-centre.nl), grant number 024.004.022.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Geosciences, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy

    Giorgia Nadizar

  2. Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy

    Eric Medvet

  3. Artificial Intelligence Department, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Karine Miras

Authors
  1. Giorgia Nadizar
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  2. Eric Medvet
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  3. Karine Miras
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eric Medvet .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy

    Eric Medvet

  2. Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil

    Gisele Pappa

  3. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Bing Xue

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Nadizar, G., Medvet, E., Miras, K. (2022). On the Schedule for Morphological Development of Evolved Modular Soft Robots. In: Medvet, E., Pappa, G., Xue, B. (eds) Genetic Programming. EuroGP 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13223. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02056-8_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02056-8_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-02055-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-02056-8

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