Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Mike Angus is a pioneering researcher in evolutionary robotics, whose work centers on the grand challenge of creating autonomous robot ecosystems that evolve both their bodies (morphologies) and brains (controllers) in the real world. As a key contributor to the Autonomous Robot Evolution (ARE) project, Angus has developed the foundational hardware and software infrastructure needed to make this vision a reality. His most influential contribution is the ARE Robot Fabricator, a system capable of autonomously constructing unique robot individuals without prior knowledge of their designs—a critical enabler for real-world evolution. Angus has also made significant strides in combining evolution with learning, introducing methods that use controller archives as inheritance mechanisms and applying Bayesian optimisation to efficiently refine newborn robots' controllers. His work on bootstrapping artificial evolution for autonomous fabrication and designing practical hardware for evolvable robots has been widely recognized, with his top papers collectively garnering over 140 citations. By tackling the joint optimisation of robot body and brain, Angus is helping to move evolutionary robotics from simulation into tangible, self-sustaining physical systems that could one day operate in challenging, dynamic environments without human oversight.