 |
Art & Artificial Life International Competition | Home | Entry | Editions | References | Español | |
 |
|
Complex biological forms reproduce by taking advantage of an arbitrarily complex set of auto-catalyzing chemical reactions. Biological life is in control of its own means of reproduction, and this autonomy of design and manufacture is a key element which has not yet been understood or reproduced artificially. to this date, robots - a form of artificial life - are still designed laboriously and constructed by teams of human engineers at great cost. Few robots are available because these costs must be absorved through mass production that is justified only for toys, weapons, and industrial systems like automatic teller machines. Here we report a set of experiments in which simple electro-mechanical systems evolve from scratch to yield physical locomoting machines. Like biological lifeforms whose structure and function exploit the behaviors afforded by their own chemical and mechanical medium, our evolved creatures take advantage of the nature of their own medium - thermoplastic, motors, and artificial neurons. We thus achieve autonomy of design nad construction using evolution in a limited universe physical simulation coipled to off-the-shelf rapd manufacturing technology. This is the first time robots have been robotically designed and robotically fabricated. Experiments were performed using version 1.2 of GOLEM (Genetically Organized Lifelike Electro Mechanics), which can be obtained from http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/golem. |
