Evolution of Central pattern Generators for Bipedal Walking in a Real-time Physics Environment

We describe an evolutionary approach to the control problem of bipedal walking. Using a full rigid-body simulation of a biped, it was possible to evolve recurrent neural networks that controlled stable straight-line walking on a planar surface. No proprioceptive information was necessary to achieve this task. Furthermore, simple sensory input to locate a sound source was integrated to achieve directional walking. To our knowledge, this is the first work that demonstrates the application of evolutionary optimization to three-dimensional physically simulated biped locomotion. Index TermsBipedal walking, evolutionary algorithms, evolutionary robotics, physics, recurrent neural networks