Evolving non-Trivial Behaviors on Real Robots: an Autonomous Robot that Picks up Objects

Recently, a new approach that involves a form of simulated evolution has been proposed for the building of autonomous robots. However, it is still not clear if this approach may be adequate to face real life problems. In this paper we show how control systems that perform a non-trivial sequence of behaviors can be obtained with this methodology by carefully designing the conditions in which the evolutionary process operates. In the experiment described in the paper, a mobile robot is trained to locate, recognize, and grasp a target object. The controller of the robot has been evolved in simulation and then downloaded and tested on the real robot. 1 Introduction Work in Artificial Life (see Langton, 1989) has introduced new techniques for developing creatures living and behaving in a variety of environments. More recently, there have been several attempts to apply Artificial Life techniques to the design of mobile robots. This type of approaches, identified as Evolutionary Robotics be..