Using standard components in evolutionary robotics to produce an inexpensive robot arm

Abstract

Evolutionary Robotics (ER) makes use of evolutionary algorithms to evolve controllers and morphologies of robots. Despite successful demonstrations in laboratory experiments, ER has not been widely adopted by industry as means of robot design. A possible reason for this is that current ER approaches ignore issues that are important when designing robots for practical use. For example, the availability and cost of components used for robot construction should be considered. A robot designed by the ER process may require specialised custom components to be built to support the physical functioning of the design, if the components selected by an ER process are not widely available. Alternatively, the ER designed robot may be too expensive to be constructed. This paper demonstrates that standard off-the-shelf components can be used by the ER process to design a robot. A robot arm is used as a sample problem, which is successfully optimised to use components from a fixed list while minimising cost.