Biologically Inspired Embodied Evolution of Survival

Abstract

Embodied evolution is a methodology for evolutionary robotics that mimics the distributed, asynchronous and autonomous properties of biological evolution. The evaluation, selection and reproduction are carried out by and between the robots, without any need for human intervention. In this paper, we propose a biologically inspired embodied evolution framework, which fully integrates self-preservation, recharging from external batteries in the environment, and self-reproduction, pair-wise exchange of genetic material, into a survival system. The individuals are explicitly evaluated for the performance of the battery capturing task, but also implicitly for the mating task by the fact that an individual that mates frequently has larger probability to spread its gene in the population. We have evaluated our method in simulation experiments and the simulation results show that the solutions obtained by our embodied evolution method were able to optimize the two survival tasks, battery capturing and mating, simultaneously. We have also performed preliminary experiments in hardware, with promising results.