Novelty-Based Evolutionary Design of Morphing Underwater Robots

Recent developments in robotics demonstrated that bioin-spiration and embodiement are powerful tools to achieve robust behavior in presence of little control. In this con-text morphological design is usually performed by humans, following a set of heuristic principles: in general this can be limiting, both from an engineering and an artificial life perspectives. In this work we thus suggest a different ap-proach, leveraging evolutionary techniques. The case study is the one of improving the locomotion capabilities of an existing bioinspired robot. First, we explore the behavior space of the robot to discover a number of qualitatively different morphology-enabled behaviors, from whose anal-ysis design indications are gained. The suitability of novelty search – a recent open-ended evolutionary algorithm – fo