Evolving flying creatures with path-following behavior. ALife IX

We present a system which evolves physically simulated 3D flying creatures and their maneuvers. The creature is mod-elled as a number of articulated cylinders connected by tri-angular patagia in between. A creature’s wing structure and its low-level controllers for straight flight are generated by an evolutionary algorithm. Then a feed-forward neural network is attached to the low-level controllers, and the connection weights of the network for a given trajectory are found by a genetic algorithm. We show that a control system sufficiently effective to allow aerial creatures to follow a complicated path can be achieved by two-step evolution process