Automated assembly as situated development: Using artificial ontogenies to evolve buildable 3-D objects

Abstract

Artificial Ontogenies, which are inspired by biological development, have been used to automatically generate a wide array of novel objects, some of which have recently been manufactured in the real world. The majority of these evolved designs have been evaluated in simulation as completed objects, with no attention paid to how, or even if, they can be realistically built. As a consequence, significant human effort is required to transfer the designs to the real world. One way to reduce human involvement in this regard is to evolve how to build rather than what to build, by using prescriptive rather than descriptive representations. In the context of Artificial Ontogenies, this requires what we call Situated Development, in which an object's development occurs in the same environment as its final evaluation. Not only does this produce sufficient information on how to build evolved designs, but it also ensures that only buildable designs are evolved. In this paper we explore the consequences of Situated Development, and demonstrate how it can be incorporated into Artificial Ontogenies in order to generate buildable objects, which can be sequentially assembled in a realistic 3-D physics environment. Copyright 2005 ACM.