Evolving the morphology of a compound eye on a robot

Abstract

Reports on an experiment in evolving the morphology of an artificial compound eye with 16 light sensors on a robot. A special robot was designed and constructed that is able to autonomously modify the angular positions of the individual light sensors within the compound eye. The task of the robot was to employ motion parallax to estimate a critical distance to obstacles. This task was achieved by adapting the morphology of the compound eye by an evolutionary algorithm while using a fixed neural network to control the robot.