Abstract

Our experiences with a range of evolutionary robotic experiments have resulted in major changes to our set-up of artificial life experiments and our interpretation of observed phenomena. Initially, we investigated simulation-reality relationships in order to transfer our artificial life simulation work with evolution of neural network agents to real robots. This is a difficult task, but can, in a lot of cases, be solved with a carefully built simulator. By being able to evolve control mechanisms for physical robots, we were able to study biological hypotheses about animal behaviours by using exactly the same experimental set-ups as were used in the animal behavioural experiments. Evolutionary robotic experiments with rats open field box experiments and chick detours show how evolutionary robotics can be a powerful biological tool, and they also suggest that incremental learning might be fruitful for achieving complex robot behaviour in an evolutionary context. However, it is not enough...

Citations