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John Rieffel
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Artificial Life (2017) 23 (2): 119–123.
Published: 01 May 2017
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Artificial Life (2016) 22 (2): 135–137.
Published: 01 May 2016
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Artificial Life (2014) 20 (1): 143–162.
Published: 01 January 2014
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Completely soft and flexible robots offer to revolutionize fields ranging from search and rescue to endoscopic surgery. One of the outstanding challenges in this burgeoning field is the chicken-and-egg problem of body-brain design: Development of locomotion requires the preexistence of a locomotion-capable body, and development of a location-capable body requires the preexistence of a locomotive gait. This problem is compounded by the high degree of coupling between the material properties of a soft body (such as stiffness or damping coefficients) and the effectiveness of a gait. This article synthesizes four years of research into soft robotics, in particular describing three approaches to the co-discovery of soft robot morphology and control. In the first, muscle placement and firing patterns are coevolved for a fixed body shape with fixed material properties. In the second, the material properties of a simulated soft body coevolve alongside locomotive gaits, with body shape and muscle placement fixed. In the third, a developmental encoding is used to scalably grow elaborate soft body shapes from a small seed structure. Considerations of the simulation time and the challenges of physically implementing soft robots in the real world are discussed.