Understanding fitness landscapes in morpho-evolution via local optima networks
Conference Proceeding
Thomson, S. L., Le Goff, L., Hart, E., & Buchanan, E. (in press)
Understanding fitness landscapes in morpho-evolution via local optima networks. . https://doi.org/10.1145/3638529.3654059
Morpho-Evolution (ME) refers to the simultaneous optimisation of a robot's design and controller to maximise performance given a task and environment. Many genetic encodings h...
Generalized Early Stopping in Evolutionary Direct Policy Search
Journal Article
Arza, E., Le Goff, L. K., & Hart, E. (in press)
Generalized Early Stopping in Evolutionary Direct Policy Search. ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization, https://doi.org/10.1145/3653024
Lengthy evaluation times are common in many optimization problems such as direct policy search tasks, especially when they involve conducting evaluations in the physical world...
Evaluation of Frameworks That Combine Evolution and Learning to Design Robots in Complex Morphological Spaces
Journal Article
Li, W., Buchanan, E., Goff, L. K. L., Hart, E., Hale, M. F., Wei, B., …Tyrrell, A. M. (in press)
Evaluation of Frameworks That Combine Evolution and Learning to Design Robots in Complex Morphological Spaces. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, https://doi.org/10.1109/tevc.2023.3316363
Jointly optimising both the body and brain of a robot is known to be a challenging task, especially when attempting to evolve designs in simulation that will subsequently be b...
Robotics and Autonomous Systems for Environmental Sustainability: Monitoring Terrestrial Biodiversity
Working Paper
Pringle, S., Davies, Z. G., Goddard, M. A., Dallimer, M., Hart, E., Le Goff, L., & Langdale, S. J. (2023)
Robotics and Autonomous Systems for Environmental Sustainability: Monitoring Terrestrial Biodiversity
Welcome to the UK-RAS White paper Series on Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS). This is one of the core activities of UK-RAS Network, funded by the Engineering and Physical...
Morpho-evolution with learning using a controller archive as an inheritance mechanism
Journal Article
Le Goff, L. K., Buchanan, E., Hart, E., Eiben, A. E., Li, W., De Carlo, M., …Tyrrell, A. M. (in press)
Morpho-evolution with learning using a controller archive as an inheritance mechanism. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, https://doi.org/10.1109/tcds.2022.3148543
Most work in evolutionary robotics centres on evolving a controller for a fixed body-plan. However, previous studiessuggest that simultaneously evolving both controller ...
Artificial evolution of robot bodies and control: on the interaction between evolution, individual and cultural learning
Journal Article
Hart, E., & Le Goff, L. K. (2022)
Artificial evolution of robot bodies and control: on the interaction between evolution, individual and cultural learning. Philosophical Transactions B: Biological Sciences, 377(1843), https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0117
We survey and reflect on evolutionary approaches to the joint optimisation of the body and control of a robot, in scenarios where a the goal is to find a design that maximises...
On the challenges of jointly optimising robot morphology and control using a hierarchical optimisation scheme
Conference Proceeding
Goff, L. K. L., & Hart, E. (2021)
On the challenges of jointly optimising robot morphology and control using a hierarchical optimisation scheme. In GECCO '21: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion (1498-1502). https://doi.org/10.1145/3449726.3463156
We investigate a hierarchical scheme for the joint optimisation of robot bodies and controllers in a complex morphological space. An evolutionary algorithm optimises body-plan...
Hardware Design for Autonomous Robot Evolution
Conference Proceeding
Hale, M. F., Angus, M., Buchanan, E., Li, W., Woolley, R., Le Goff, L. K., …Tyrrell, A. M. (2020)
Hardware Design for Autonomous Robot Evolution. In 2020 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI) (2140-2147). https://doi.org/10.1109/SSCI47803.2020.9308204
The long term goal of the Autonomous Robot Evolution (ARE) project is to create populations of physical robots, in which both the controllers and body plans are evolved. The t...
Evolution of Diverse, Manufacturable Robot Body Plans
Conference Proceeding
Buchanan, E., Le Goff, L., Hart, E., Eiben, A. E., De Carlo, M., Li, W., …Tyrrell, A. M. (2020)
Evolution of Diverse, Manufacturable Robot Body Plans. In 2020 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI) (2132-2139). https://doi.org/10.1109/SSCI47803.2020.9308434
Advances in rapid prototyping have opened up new avenues of research within Evolutionary Robotics in which not only controllers but also the body plans (morphologies) of robot...
Bootstrapping artificial evolution to design robots for autonomous fabrication
Journal Article
Buchanan, E., Le Goff, L. K., Li, W., Hart, E., Eiben, A. E., De Carlo, M., …Tyrrell, A. M. (2020)
Bootstrapping artificial evolution to design robots for autonomous fabrication. Robotics, 9(4), https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics9040106
A long-term vision of evolutionary robotics is a technology enabling the evolution of entire autonomous robotic ecosystems that live and work for long periods in challenging a...