The effect of change in evolution parameters on evolutionary robots

One of the recent trends of robot design involves the evolution of morphology and controller of robots using techniques from evolutionary computation. In this co-evolution process, the evolution system utilises the stochastic and heuristic nature of artificial evolution to evolve robots for specific tasks. Inspired by natural evolution, a population of initial solutions are randomly created and selected parents are mated to produce offspring. Based on the performance or fitness of individual solutions including children, next generation is chosen and this process continues until a solution of satisfactory performance is reached. Among various methods of evolution, Genetic Algorithms (GA) is commonly used for evolution of morphology. In this paper, the effect of change in various evolution parameters in the GA on the final solution is studied. Parameters such as size of population, number of generations evolved and several variation parameters are varied. Experiments are conducted to evolve mobile robots primarily for locomotion on a flat surface on an open source evolutionary robots design platform called RoboGen. Robots are evolved from a specific set of parts which includes various structural components, active and passive joints and sensors