How Evolution Shapes the Way Roboticists Think

Interdisciplinary research in the 21st century is characterized by bidirectional flows: one domain provides inspiration to another, which, after an advance, provides inspiration back to the donating domain. In this abstract I outline three such flows between the domains of evolutionary biology and robotics. First, biological evolution shapes all aspects of an organism’s body and brain simultaneously. This led to work in which artificial evolution optimizes the morphology and neural control of robots such that they perform increasingly sophisticated tasks. Second, evolution causes change over evolutionary time, but also over the lifetime of the organism. This led to work in which virtual robots change body plans as they evolve to perform more complex tasks, but their bodies also change as they perform those tasks. Finally, evolution always works on populations. This led to work in which populations of humans collaborate and compete to evolve increasingly sophisticated robots. © Selection and peer-review under responsibility of FET11 conference organizers and published by Elsevier B.V.