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Related work

DarwinBot is not the first project to evolve robot bodies and controllers together, nor the first to use MAP-Elites for it. What it adds is the whole path for one hobby parts kit: evolution constrained by real servos, printing and assembly rules, then STL parts, a bill of materials, an assembly guide and a firmware control file for any robot in the archive.

  • MAP-Elites for modular robots. Nordmoen, Veenstra, Ellefsen and Glette, MAP-Elites Enables Powerful Stepping Stones and Diversity for Modular Robotics, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 2021. MAP-Elites over modular robot bodies keeps more diverse morphologies than a single-objective search and finds better robots through those stepping stones; the same reason DarwinBot keeps an archive instead of one winner.
  • Revolve2. Revolve2, from the Computational Intelligence group at VU Amsterdam: a framework for evolving modular robot bodies and brains in simulation, with support for building and running them physically.
  • Hardware limits on evolvable robots. Angus, Buchanan, Le Goff, Hart, Eiben, De Carlo, Winfield, Hale, Woolley, Timmis and Tyrrell, Practical hardware for evolvable robots, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 2023. From the Autonomous Robot Evolution project: manufacturing, assembly and power delivery rule out many simulated designs, and filtering or repairing them reduces the population's diversity. DarwinBot meets the same trade-off with its printing rules, assembly checks and repairs (morphology.fit_rules, fit_clashes).

Where DarwinBot differs:

  • Bodies are continuous trees (any link length, bend, mount position and torso outline) rather than a grid of fixed modules, and every one is checked against printable parts and servo housings before it is simulated.
  • Every robot in the archive exports to printable parts and a control file for the same CPG, whose C++ core is tested against the Python one.
  • It has not been built yet: the step from simulation to a real robot, and feeding what a real one measures back into the simulator, is the roadmap's "Assemble every export virtually, then build one".