Impact of Energy Efficiency on the Morphology and Behaviour of Evolved Robots
This addresses the practical issue of energy efficiency for real-world autonomous robots, but it is incremental as it extends existing evolutionary robotics methods.
The study tackled the problem of energy efficiency in evolutionary robotics by incorporating a battery model and energy consumption into fitness evaluations, finding that this reduces robot body size and speed, though some robots without size reduction achieve comparable speeds to baseline robots.
Most evolutionary robotics studies focus on evolving some targeted behavior without taking the energy usage into account. This limits the practical value of such systems because energy efficiency is an important property for real-world autonomous robots. In this paper, we mitigate this problem by extending our simulator with a battery model and taking energy consumption into account during fitness evaluations. Using this system we investigate how energy awareness affects the evolution of robots. Since our system is to evolve morphologies as well as controllers, the main research question is twofold: (i) what is the impact on the morphologies of the evolved robots, and (ii) what is the impact on the behavior of the evolved robots if energy consumption is included in the fitness evaluation? The results show that including the energy consumption in the fitness in a multi-objective fashion (by NSGA-II) reduces the average size of robot bodies while at the same time reducing their speed. However, robots generated without size reduction can achieve speeds comparable to robots from the baseline set.