title: Three generations of automatically designed robots.
abstract: The difficulties associated with designing, building, and controlling robots have led their development to a stasis: Applications are limited mostly to repetitive tasks with predefined behavior. Over the last few years we have been trying to address this challenge through an alternative approach: Rather than trying to control an existing machine or create a general-purpose robot, we propose that both the morphology and the controller should evolve at the same time. This process can lead to the automatic design of special-purpose mechanisms and controllers for specific short-term objectives. Here we provide a brief review of three generations of our recent research, which underlies the robots shown on the cover of this issue: Automatically designed static structures, automatically designed and manufactured dynamic electromechanical systems, and modular robots automatically designed through a generative DNA-like encoding.
authors.affiliation: DEMO Laboratory Computer Science Dept., Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454, USA. pollack@cs.brandeis.edu
authors.forename: J B
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Pollack
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Lipson
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Hornby
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Funes
mesh_terms: D017076:Computer-Aided Design / Q000191:economics / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000639:trends*; D012371:Robotics / Q000191:economics / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000639:trends*