Editorial: Evolving Robotic Morphologies

David Howard, Kyrre Glette, Nick Cheney

Abstract: Morphological adaptation is a key challenge for Evolutionary Robotics \citep{bongard2013evolutionary,doncieux2015evolutionary}, and robotics in general. Consideration of a robot’s physical form in addition to its control system holds particular promise for imbuing robotic systems with task and environmental adaptability \citep{sims1994evolving,lipson2000automatic}. The additional degrees of behavioural freedom that can be unlocked when morphology is considered in the evolutionary process allows access to a wide design space, providing a pathway towards resilient, rugged, and adaptable robots that can cope with unforeseen circumstances and be realistically deployed in real-world scenarios \citep{nygaard2021real}, with corresponding real-world impacts. Morphology evolution allows us to create and study systems based on the principles of embodied cognition, whereby coupling (evolved) controllers to (evolved) physical substrates in a meaningful environment \citep{miras2019effects} allows for surprising, rich behaviours that emerge from interactions between the three \citep{lehman2020surprising,lehman2011evolving}. Embodied cognition provides a route towards improving the complexity and adaptivity of evolved behaviours, leading to a corresponding increase in the applicability of evolutionary robotics systems to challenging scenarios.Systems that can fully exploit the principles of embodied cognition and automatically evolve environment-adapted and task-specific robots is an amb...