An evolution approach to optimize the morphology of a six legged-wheeled hybrid mobile robot

This paper proposed an evolution method in designing the morphology of a six legged-wheeled hybrid mobile robot which has the ability to climb over obstacles. A single objective evolution algorithm has been proposed to obtain an optimized morphology of a six legged-wheeled hybrid mobile robot with a smaller body while having best performance to climb over obstacles without collision. Results show that a fitter robot is obtained which is smaller and has a better performance in climbing obstacles than a manual hand-designed robot. The fittest robot obtained from the evolution has a very significant improvement in its fitness score compared to the manual hand-designed robot. In future, multi-objective evolution algorithm will be intended to be integrated into the evolution process to obtain a set of robot from the Pareto optimal solutions. Besides that, co-evolution of both of the controller and morphology will be investigated in order to have a more comprehensive evolution process.