Matt Quinn
Papers
12
Total Citations
656
H-Index
10
About
Matt Quinn is a researcher whose work sits at the intersection of evolutionary robotics, autonomous systems, and computational cognitive science. Best known for his 2005 survey "Evolutionary Robotics: A New Scientific Tool for Studying Cognition" — which has accumulated nearly 300 citations — Quinn helped establish evolutionary robotics as a rigorous scientific methodology for probing minimal models of cognition, tracing its intellectual lineage through artificial neural networks, behavior-based robotics, and evolutionary algorithms. A significant thread of Quinn's research focuses on multi-robot systems, particularly the challenge of evolving cooperative behaviors in homogeneous robot teams. His 2003 paper on structured cooperation using minimal infrared sensors (152 citations) demonstrated that artificial evolution could produce sophisticated formation-movement and role-allocation strategies without complex sensing hardware. Complementary work explored how teams of physically identical robots could develop differentiated, collaborative behaviors — a counterintuitive and influential finding for the field. Quinn also made notable contributions to the evolution of learning behavior, investigating fixed-weight and dynamic neural networks as alternatives to plasticity-based approaches. His ecological modeling of learning using robot-based systems further bridged evolutionary biology and robotics. Across his career, Quinn's research has helped shape foundational questions about how intelligence and cooperation emerge through evolutionary processes.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Evolutionary Robotics: A New Scientific Tool for Studying Cognition290 citations · 2005
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- 4A comparison of approaches to the evolution of homogeneous multi-robot teams39 citations · 2002
- 5Evolving teamwork and role-allocation with real robots36 citations · 2002
- 6Evolving fixed-weight networks for learning robots20 citations · 2003
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- 10Evolving co-operative homogeneous multi-robot teams13 citations · 2002