Evolutionary Design of a Whisker Equipped Robot

In this paper we present an approach of how to design a robot for using tactile sensors using an evolutionary algorithms. Designing a whisker-equipped robot requires that two design objectives have to be addressed simultaneously. The robot controller must be capable of using the whisker information, and the configuration of the whiskers have to be aligned to the controller: A: Find a "good whisker configuration for a given robot controller. B: Find a "good robot controller for a given whisker configuration. The optimisation using a simulated robot with six whiskers and a simple reactive controller clearly demonstrates that the chosen evolutionary algorithm yields a drastic increase of the robot performance.