26 General Principles of Evolutionary Morphology

Abstract

The paper presents a new structured approach to inventive engineering design, d called evolutionary morphology (EM), as proposed by the author of this article. In the first part of the paper we present the main paradigms and the formalization of this new method integrating morphological and evolutionary approaches. EM and evolutionary algorithms are in fact complementary methods. Evolutionary algorithms start from a given initial population to obtain an optimum solution with respect to a fitness function. EM creates this initial population to enhance the chance of obtaining a ``more global optimum'' by non-quantified diversification of the initial population. Evolutionary algorithms are optimized oriented methods; EM is a conceptual design oriented method. EM is formalized by a 6-tuple of final objectives, primary elements, morphological operators, evolution criteria, morphologies and a termination criterion. The main EM paradigms are inspired by the synthetic theory of evolution developed by modern biology. In the second part, an application to inventive design of orthogonal anthropomorphic robotic manipulators with only isolated singularities is presented.