A hybrid GP/GA approach for co-evolving controllers and robot bodies to achieve fitness-specified tasks

Evolutionary approaches have been advocated to automate robot design. Some research work has shown the success of evolving controllers for the robots by genetic approaches. As we can observe, however, not only the controller but also the robot body itself can affect the behavior of the robot in a robot system. We develop a hybrid GP/GA approach to evolve both controllers and robot bodies to achieve behavior-specified tasks. In order to assess the performance of the developed approach, it is used to evolve a simulated agent, with its own controller and body, to do obstacle avoidance in the simulated environment. Experimental results show the promise of this work. In addition, the importance of co-evolving controllers and robot bodies is analyzed and discussed