A cell-based developmental model to generate robot morphologies

Abstract

This paper presents a new method to generate the body plans of modular robots. In this work, we use a developmental model where cells are controlled by a gene regulatory network. Instead of using morphogens as in many existing works, we evolve a more flexible "hormonal system" that controls the inputs of the regulatory network. By evolving the regulatory network and the hormonal system in parallel with a blind watchmaker, we have generated various virtual robots with interesting inherent properties such as regularity and symmetry. The prototypes of the robotic blocks that will be used to actually build the real machines are also presented in this paper.