Evolving Quadruped Gaits with a Heterogeneous Modular Robotic System

There has been much research into the development of robotic controllers in educational, industrial and government research labs, but limited hardware budgets constrain the types of morphologies in which researchers can experiment with. One option is to use LEGO components or other toy-grade kits, but these have well-known limitations. Here we present a heterogeneous modular robotic platform that can be reconfigured to a wide variety of robot morphologies, such as legged robots and manipulator arms. In addition, we have developed a simulation environment for our modules allowing for the artificial evolution, or learning, of behaviors to occur in simulation for transfer to reality. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system by evolving a quadruped gait in simulation which successfully transfers to a hardware version of this robot.