Effects of environmental conditions on evolved robot morphologies and behavior

Abstract

This paper studies the effects of different environments on morphological and behavioral properties of evolving populations of modular robots. To assess these properties, a set of morphological and behavioral descriptors was defined and the evolving population mapped in this multi-dimensional space. Surprisingly, the results show that seemingly distinct environments can lead to the same regions of this space, i.e., evolution can produce the same kind of morphologies/behaviors under conditions that humans perceive as quite different. These experiments indicate that demonstrating the 'ground truth' of evolution stating the firm impact of the environment on evolved morphologies is harder in evolutionary robotics than usually assumed.