The Effects of the Environment and Linear Actuators on Robot Morphologies

TL;DR

This study explores how environmental complexity and the addition of linear actuators influence robot evolution, revealing that terrain affects morphology more than actuator inclusion in simulated locomotion tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a linear actuator module inspired by skeletal muscles into the RoboGen framework and compares evolved robot morphologies across different terrains.

Findings

Linear actuators do not significantly affect performance in plain environments.

Environment complexity leads to more diverse and complex robot morphologies.

Terrain variation impacts evolved robot behaviors more than actuator modifications.

Abstract

The field of evolutionary robotics uses principles of natural evolution to design robots. In this paper, we study the effect of adding a new module inspired by the skeletal muscle to the existing RoboGen framework: the linear actuator. Additionally, we investigate how robots evolved in a plain environment differ from robots evolved in a rough environment. We consider the task of directed locomotion for comparing evolved robot morphologies. The results show that the addition of the linear actuator does not have a significant impact on the performance and morphologies of robots evolved in a plain environment. However, we find significant differences in the morphologies of robots evolved in a plain environment and robots evolved in a rough environment. We find that more complex behavior and morphologies emerge when we change the terrain of the environment.