Artificial Life and Real Robots

The first part of this paper explores the general issues in using Artificial Life techniques to program actual mobile robots. In particular it explores the difficulties inherent in transferring programs evolved in a simulated environment to run on an actual robot. It examines the dual evolution of organism morphology and nervous systems in biology. It proposes techniques to capture some of the search space pruning that dual evolution offers in the domain of robot programming. It explores the relationship between robot morphology and program structure, and techniques for capturing regularities across this mapping. The second part of the paper is much more specific. It proposes techniques which could allow realistic explorations concerning the evolution of programs to control physically embodied mobile robots. In particular we introduce a new abstraction for behavior-based robot programming which is specially tailored to be used with genetic programming techniques. To compete with hand coding techniques it will be necessary to automatically evolve programs that are one to two orders of magnitude more complex than those previously reported in any domain. Considerable extensions to previously reported approaches to genetic programming are necessary in order to achieve this goal.