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Evolutionary design of soft-bodied animats with decentralized control

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Abstract

We show how a biologically inspired model of multicellular development combined with a simulated evolutionary process can be used to design the morphologies and controllers of soft-bodied virtual animats. An animat’s morphology is the result of a developmental process that starts from a single cell and goes through many cell divisions, during which cells interact via simple physical rules. Every cell contains the same genome, which encodes a gene regulatory network (GRN) controlling its behavior. After the developmental stage, locomotion emerges from the coordinated activity of the GRNs across the virtual robot body. Since cells act autonomously, the behavior of the animat is generated in a truly decentralized fashion. The movement of the animat is produced by the contraction and expansion of parts of the body, caused by the cells, and is simulated using a physics engine. Our system makes possible the evolution and development of animats that can run, swim, and actively navigate toward a target in a virtual environment.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) through the JSPS Fellowship for Foreign Researchers, the JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, and the Polish National Science Center (project BIOMERGE, 2011/03/B/ST6/00399). High performance computing resources were provided by the Interdisciplinary Center for Molecular and Mathematical Modeling (ICM, University of Warsaw; project G33-8) and the Tri-city Academic Computer Center (TASK).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan

    Michał Joachimczak

  2. Systems Modeling Laboratory, Institute of Oceanology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Sopot, Poland

    Michał Joachimczak & Borys Wróbel

  3. Institut des Systèmes Complexes, Paris Île-de-France (ISC-PIF), CNRS, Paris, France

    Taras Kowaliw & René Doursat

  4. School of Biomedical Engineering, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA

    René Doursat

  5. Erasmus Mundus Masters in Complex Systems Science, École Polytechnique, Paris, France

    René Doursat

  6. Evolutionary Systems Laboratory, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

    Borys Wróbel

Authors
  1. Michał Joachimczak
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  2. Taras Kowaliw
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  3. René Doursat
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  4. Borys Wróbel
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Correspondence to Michał Joachimczak.

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Joachimczak, M., Kowaliw, T., Doursat, R. et al. Evolutionary design of soft-bodied animats with decentralized control. Artif Life Robotics 18, 152–160 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-013-0121-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-013-0121-1

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