Karine Miras

About

Karine Miras is a pioneering researcher in Evolutionary Robotics, specializing in the automatic design of robotic systems through evolutionary computation, with a particular focus on morphological evolution, environmental adaptation, and the interplay between evolution and learning. Her work has fundamentally advanced our understanding of how environmental conditions shape the bodies and behaviors of evolving modular robots, demonstrating through rigorous simulation studies that habitat history leaves lasting imprints on robot morphology — findings with profound implications for both robotics and theoretical biology. Among her most influential contributions, Miras has systematically examined how fitness functions, genetic encodings, and selection pressures constrain or expand the evolutionary search space, moving the field beyond purely performance-oriented metrics. Her research on Lamarckian evolutionary principles and the coupling of morphological development with lifetime learning represents a distinctive intellectual thread, questioning foundational assumptions about how robots — and perhaps organisms — acquire adaptive traits. Her top papers have collectively accumulated over 190 citations, reflecting strong community recognition. Notably, her 2019 study on environmental effects on evolved robot morphologies and her 2018 search space analysis stand as cornerstone references in the field, making her work essential reading for students exploring the frontier of embodied artificial intelligence and computational evolution.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Effects of environmental conditions on evolved robot morphologies and behavior

   40 citations · 2019
2. 2
   Search Space Analysis of Evolvable Robot Morphologies

   37 citations · 2018
3. 3
   Environmental influences on evolvable robots

   36 citations · 2020
4. 4
   Evolving-Controllers Versus Learning-Controllers for Morphologically Evolvable Robots

   23 citations · 2020
5. 5
   Effects of Selection Preferences on Evolved Robot Morphologies and Behaviors

   19 citations · 2018
6. 6
   On the Schedule for Morphological Development of Evolved Modular Soft Robots

   11 citations · 2022
7. 7
   Enhancing robot evolution through Lamarckian principles

   7 citations · 2023
8. 8
   Morphological Attractors in Darwinian and Lamarckian Evolutionary Robot Systems

   7 citations · 2018
9. 9
   The impact of environmental history on evolved robot properties

   7 citations · 2019
10. 10
    Constrained by Design: Influence of Genetic Encodings on Evolved Traits of Robots

    7 citations · 2021

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links