Morphological Evolution: Bioinspired Methods for Analyzing Bioinspired Robots

Abstract

To fully understand the evolution of complex morphologies, analyses cannot stop at selection: It is essential to investigate the roles and interactions of multiple processes that drive evolutionary outcomes. The challenges of undertaking such analyses have affected both evolutionary biologists and evolutionary roboticists, with their common interests in complex morphologies. In this paper, we present analytical techniques from evolutionary biology, selection gradient analysis and morphospace walks, and we demonstrate their applicability to robot morphologies in analyses of three evolutionary mechanisms: randomness (genetic mutation), development (an explicitly implemented genotype-to-phenotype map), and selection. In particular, we applied these analytical techniques to evolved populations of simulated biorobots—embodied robots designed specifically as models of biological systems, for the testing of biological hypotheses—and we present a variety of results, including analyses that do all of the following: illuminate different evolutionary dynamics for different classes of morphological traits; illustrate how the traits targeted by selection can vary based on the likelihood of random genetic mutation; demonstrate that selection on two selected sets of morphological traits only partially explains the variance in fitness in our biorobots; and suggest that biases in developmental processes could partially explain evolutionary dynamics of morphology. When combined, the complementary analytical approaches discussed in this paper can enable insight into evolutionary processes beyond selection and thereby deepen our understanding of the evolution of robotic morphologies.