Moving around in the environment is a fundamental skill for mobile robots. This makes the evolution of an appropriate gait, a pivotal problem in evolutionary robotics. Whereas the majority of the related studies concern robots with predefined modular or legged morphologies and locomotion speed as the optimization objective, here we investigate robots with evolvable morphologies and behavioral traits included in the fitness function. To analyze the effects we consider morphological as well as behavioral features of the evolved robots. To this end, we introduce novel behavioral measures that describe how the robot locomotes and look into the trade-off between them. Our main goal is to gain insights into differences in possible gaits of modular robots and to provide tools to steer evolution towards objectives beyond ‘simple’ speed.

Issue Section:
Special session: Bio-inspired approaches for modular robotics
evolutionary robotics, behavior evolution, gait evolution, Robots morphology
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© 2021 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
2021
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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