Miscellaneous

The research field of evolutionary robotics abstracts some of the major themes in biological evolution (heritable traits, genetic variation, and competition for scarce resources) as tools to allow computers to generate new and interesting virtual creatures. One of the recent themes in this field is towards more embodied robots (those that produce interesting behavior through the design of their bodies, as well as their brains). Here, we build on previous work evolving soft robots to demonstrate the low level embodiment of electrical signals passing information through muscle tissue. Through this work we attempt bridge the divide between embodied cognition and abstracted artificial neural networks. We hope you find the video interesting and entertaining!

This video accompanies the following paper:
Cheney, N., Clune, J., Lipson, H. (2014) "Evolved Electrophysiological Soft Robots". Proceedings of Artifical Life 14: The Fourteenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (ALife14). MIT Press.

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Work in progress - Physical prototype testing

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Do machines have what it takes to evolve? Will the future be filled with robots capable of faster, more efficient and more complex designs than we could ever come up with?

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This video shows results from a research project involving simulated Darwinian evolutions of virtual block creatures. A population of several hundred creatures is created within a supercomputer, and each creature is tested for their ability to perform a given task, such the ability to swim in a simulated water environment. Those that are most successful survive, and their virtual genes containing coded instructions for their growth, are copied, combined, and mutated to make offspring for a new population. The new creatures are again tested, and some may be improvements on their parents. As this cycle of variation and selection continues, creatures with more and more successful behaviors can emerge.
More info:
"Evolved Virtual Creatures", 1994

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Delivered by Josh Bongard
to the faculty and students of the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) department at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Researchers used the Deep Green supercomputer cluster and an evolutionary algorithm to design new life-forms that could achieve an assigned task. Then they built them by combining together different biological tissues from Xenopus laevis embryos, hence the name Xenobots.
Credit:
A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms
Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, and Josh Bongard
PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1910837117

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