Evorobot 1.1 User Manual

Evorobot (http://gral.ip.rm.cnr.it/evorobot/simulator.html) is a software for running evolutionary robotics experiments. It allows to replicate many of the experiments described in (Nolfi S. and Floreano D. [2000]. Evolutionary Robotics: The Biology, Intelligence, and Technology of Self-Organizing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books) and to run your own experiments. Evorobot runs on Windows95/98 and Windows NT. Source files are written in C and C++ and can be re-compiled with Microsoft Visual C 4.0 or higher. Evorobot allows you to run evolutionary experiments in simulation or on a real robot. To run evolutionary experiments on the real robot or to test individuals evolved in simulation on the real robot you need a Khepera robot. Khepera was designed and built at the Laboratory of Microprocessors and Interfaces, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (Mondada et al., 1993) and is currently distributed and supported by K-Team S.A. (www.k-team.com). Evorobot has been developed by Stefano Nolfi and is copyrighted (or "copylefted", to use the term introduced by the Free Software Foundation) and is covered by the GNU General Public License. This means that it may be used, copied, modified, or redistributed for free. However, any redistribution (of the original or modified code) should adhere to the General Public Licence terms, and copies should acknowledge the original author and be subject to the terms of the GNU General Public License. Sources, binaries and documentation files of Evorobot are freely available at http://gral.ip.rm.cnr.it/evorobot. The evorobot package consist of a zipped file evorobot.zip that contains the executable (evorobot.exe), the user manual in postscript (manual10.ps), the source files (*.c, *.h, *.rc files), and a set of sample files (*.cf, *.env, *.sam) that will allow you to easily replicate the experiments described in section 2 and to familiarize with the program. My ability to support Evorobot is limited, and I cannot guarantee that all bugs will be promptly fixed (although obviously it is in my interest to fix serious bugs which limit the software's usefulness). Bugs should be reported by sending email to: [email protected].