Evolving assembly plans for fully automated design and assembly

Evolutionary design has demonstrated great potential to automatically generate a wide array of novel, interesting, and human-competitive designs. Few of these evolved designs, however, have in turn been physically manufacture. This is due largely to the fact that most evolved designs only specify what to build, and carry no information on how, or even if, a designed object can be assembled in the real world. When the goal is a physical object, rather than a mere schematic, substantial further effort, most often human-level, is subsequently required to develop a physical assembly process. Evolution of such descriptive representations therefore stands as an obstacle to the full automation of both design and assembly. In this paper we describe an alternative, the evolution of prescriptive representations, which offers to remove human effort from the design-and-assembly loop.