Body symmetry in morphologically evolving modular robots

Abstract

Almost all animals natural evolution has produced on Earth have a symmetrical body. In this paper we investigate the evolution of body symmetry in an artificial system where robots evolve. To this end, we define several measures to quantify symmetry in modular robots and see how these relate to fitness that corresponds to a locomotion task. We find that, although there is only a weak correlation between symmetry and fitness over the course of a single evolutionary run, there is a positive correlation between the level of symmetry and maximum fitness when a set of runs is taken into account.