Abstract
The field of evolutionary humanoid robotics is a branch of evolutionary robotics specifically dealing with the application of evolutionary principles to humanoid robot design. Previous studies demonstrated the possible future potential of this approach by evolving walking behaviors for simulated humanoid robots with up to 20 degrees of freedom. In this paper we examine further the evolutionary process by looking at the changes in diversity over time. We then investigate the effect of the immobilization of an individual joint or joints in the robot. The latter study may be of potential future use in prosthetic design. We also explore the possibility of the evolution of humanoid robots which can cope with different environmental conditions. These include reduced ground friction (ice) and modified gravitation (moon walking). We present initial results on the implementation of our simulated humanoid robots in hardware using the Bioloid robotic platform, using a model of this robot in order to evolve the desired motion patterns, for subsequent transfer to the real robot. We finish the article with a summary and brief discussion of future work.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Michel O (2004) Webots: professional mobile robot simulation. Int J Adv Robotic Syst 1:39–42
Webots. http://www.cyberbotics.com. Commercial Mobile Robot Simulation Software
Mojon S (2003) Realization of a physic simulation for a biped robot. Semester Project, School of Computer and Communication Sciences EPFL, Switzerland, 2003
Nolfi S, Floreano D (2000) evolutionary robotics: the biology, intelligence, and technology of self-organizing machines. MIT Press, Cambridge
Eaton M, Collins JJ, Sheehan L (2001) Towards a benchmarking framework for research into bio-inspired hardware-software artifacts. Artif Life Robotics 5:40–46
Akachi K, Kaneko K, Kanehira N, et al. (2005) Development of humanoid robot HRP-3P. Proceeding of the 2005 5th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, IEEE Press, Tsukuba, Japan, pp 50–55
Boeing A, Hanham S, Braunl T (2004) Evolving autonomous biped control from simulation to reality. Proceeding of the 2nd International Conference on Autonomous Robots and Agents, December 13–15, 2004, Palmerston North, New Zealand, pp 440–445
Bongard J, Paul C (2001) Making evolution an offer it can’t refuse: morphology and the extradimensional bypass. In: Keleman, J and Sosik P (eds) Ecal 2001, LNAI 2159, pp 401–412
Ishiguro A, Fujii A, Eggenburger H (2003) Neuromodulated control of bipedal locomotion using a polymorphic CPG circuit. Adapt Behav 11:7–18.
Endo K, Maeno T, Kitano H (2002) Co-evolution of morphology and walking pattern of biped humanoid robot using evolutionary computation: consideration of characteristic of the servomotors. Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Lausanne, Switzerland, October 2002, IEEE Press, pp 2678–2683
Zhang R, Vadakkepat P, Chew CM (2003) An evolutionary algorithm for trajectory-based gait generation of biped robot. Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Singapore, 2003
Reil T, Husbands P (2002) Evolution of central pattern generators for bipedal walking in a real-time physics environment. IEEE Trans Evolut Comput 6:159–168
Sellers WI, Dennis LA, Crompton RH (2003) Predicting the metabolic energy costs of bipedalism using evolutionary robotics. J Exp Biol 206:1127–1136
Miyashita K, Ok S, Hase K (2003) Evolutionary generation of human-like bipedal locomotion. Mechatronics 13:791–807
Eaton M, Davitt TJ (2006) Automatic evolution of bipedal locomotion in a simulated humanoid robot with many degrees of freedom. Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Jan. 23–25, 2006, Oita, Japan, pp 448–451
Eaton M (2006) Evolutionary humanoid robotics: first steps towards autonomy? 50th Anniversary Summit of Artificial Intelligence: Summit Proceedings, Monte Verita, Switzerland, July 9–14, 2006
Eaton M, Davitt TJ (2007) Evolutionary control of bipedal locomotion in a high degree-of-freedom humanoid robot: first steps. Artif Life Robotics 11:112–115
Leung Y, Gao Y, Xu Zong-Ben (1997) Degree of population diversity: a perspective on premature convergence in genetic algorithms and its Markov chain analysis. IEEE Trans Neural Networks 8:1165–1176
Hild M, Jungel M, Spranger M (2006) Humanoid team Humboldt team description 2006. Proceedings of CD Robocup 2006, Springer, Bremen, June 2006
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
About this article
Cite this article
Eaton, M. Further explorations in evolutionary humanoid robotics. Artif Life Robotics 12, 133–137 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-007-0454-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-007-0454-8