Abstract
In this article we explore some of the issues currently facing researchers in the interface between the twin fields of Artificial Life and Robotics, and the challenges and potential synergy of these two areas in the creation of future robotic life forms. There are three strands of research which we feel will be of key importance in the possible development of future embodied artificial life forms. These are the areas of evolutionary robotics and evolutionary humanoid robotics in particular, probabilistic robotics for deliberation, and robot benchmarking with associated metrics and standards. We briefly explore each of these areas in turn, focusing on our current research in each field and what we see as the potential issues and challenges for the future.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bedau M (2003) Artificial life: organization, adaptation and complexity from the bottom up. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 7, No. 11, November
Holland O (2001) From the imitation of life to machine consciousness. In: Gomi T (ed) ER2001, LNCS 2217, pp 1–37
Brooks R (2001) Steps towards living machines. In: Gomi T (ed) ER2001, LNCS 2217, pp 72–93
Hild M, Jungel M, Spranger M (2006) Humanoid team Humboldt team description 2006. Proceedings CD Robocup 2006, Springer, Bremen
Michel O (2004) Webots: professional mobile robot simulation. Int J Adv Robotic Syst 1:39–42
Eaton M (2007) Explorations in evolutionary humanoid robotics. Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, January 25–27, 2007, Japan, ISAROB, Oita, pp 88–91
Nolfi S, Floreano D (2000) Evolutionary robotics: the biology, intelligence, and technology of self-organizing machines. MIT Press, Cambridge
Boeing A, Hanham S, Braunl T (2004) Evolving autonomous biped control from simulation to reality. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Autonomous Robots and Agents, December 13–15, 2004, Palmerton North, New Zealand, pp 440–445
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 2002 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Lausanne, October 2002, IEEE, Lausanne, Switzerland, pp 2678–2683
Zhang R, Vadakkepat P (2003) An evolutionary algorithm for trajectory-based gait generation of a biped robot. Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Singapore 2003, Singapore
Brooks R (1999) Cambrian intelligence. MIT Press, Cambridge
Thrun S, Burgard W, Fox D (2005) Probabilistic robotics. MIT Press, Cambridge
Collins T (2007) Real-time occupancy grid mapping with forward models. PhD Thesis, Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Limerick, Ireland
Mansfield M (2006) Tackling the effects of perceptual aliasing on reinforcement learning. PhD Thesis, Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Limerick, Ireland
Collins JJ, Eaton M (1999) Open issues in the design and synthesis of intelligent robot control architectures. Proceedings of the 10th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, AICS’99, September 1999, Cork, Ireland
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
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Additional information
This work was presented in part at the 13th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 31–February 2, 2008
About this article
Cite this article
Eaton, M., Collins, J.J. Artificial life and embodied robotics: current issues and future challenges. Artif Life Robotics 13, 406–409 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-008-0596-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-008-0596-3