Constrained by Design: Influence of Genetic Encodings on Evolved Traits of Robots
Open Access
- 15 June 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Frontiers Media SA in Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Abstract
Genetic encodings and their particular properties are known to have a strong influence on the success of evolutionary systems. However, the literature has widely focused on studying the effects that encodings have on performance, i.e., fitness-oriented studies. Notably, this anchoring of the literature to performance is limiting, considering that performance provides bounded information about the behavior of a robot system. In this paper, we investigate how genetic encodings constrain the space of robot phenotypes and robot behavior. In summary, we demonstrate how two generative encodings of different nature lead to very different robots and discuss these differences. Our principal contributions are creating awareness about robot encoding biases, demonstrating how such biases affect evolved morphological, control, and behavioral traits, and finally scrutinizing the trade-offs among different biases.This publication has 32 references indexed in Scilit:
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