Embodied Evolution in Collective Robotics: A Review

TL;DR

This review paper surveys the evolution of embodied evolution in collective robotics from 1999 to 2017, highlighting its shift from small robot groups to large swarm-like collectives and discussing future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview and classification of embodied evolution techniques, clarifies its conceptual framework, and identifies major research trends and open questions.

Findings

Shift from small to large robot collectives in research focus

Embodied evolution now viewed as on-line distributed learning for swarms

Identifies key trends and future challenges in the field

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of evolutionary robotics techniques applied to on-line distributed evolution for robot collectives -- namely, embodied evolution. It provides a definition of embodied evolution as well as a thorough description of the underlying concepts and mechanisms. The paper also presents a comprehensive summary of research published in the field since its inception (1999-2017), providing various perspectives to identify the major trends. In particular, we identify a shift from considering embodied evolution as a parallel search method within small robot collectives (fewer than 10 robots) to embodied evolution as an on-line distributed learning method for designing collective behaviours in swarm-like collectives. The paper concludes with a discussion of applications and open questions, providing a milestone for past and an inspiration for future research.