Environmental regulation using Plasticoding for the evolution of robots
This addresses the challenge of dynamic environmental adaptation in evolutionary robotics, offering a novel regulatory mechanism that could enhance robot flexibility and performance in changing conditions, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of robots being indirectly affected by environmental properties in evolutionary systems by introducing Plasticoding, a robot encoding method that allows environmental conditions to directly regulate robot morphology, controller, and behavior at any point in its lifetime. The results show that Plasticoding improves adaptation and leads to diverse evolved traits, though specific performance numbers are not provided.
Evolutionary robot systems are usually affected by the properties of the environment indirectly through selection. In this paper, we present and investigate a system where the environment also has a direct effect: through regulation. We propose a novel robot encoding method where a genotype encodes multiple possible phenotypes, and the incarnation of a robot depends on the environmental conditions taking place in a determined moment of its life. This means that the morphology, controller, and behavior of a robot can change according to the environment. Importantly, this process of development can happen at any moment of a robot lifetime, according to its experienced environmental stimuli. We provide an empirical proof-of-concept, and the analysis of the experimental results shows that Plasticoding improves adaptation (task performance) while leading to different evolved morphologies, controllers, and behaviour.