Cell Interactions as a Control Tool of Developmental Processes for Evolutionary Robotics

Abstract

This paper describes new genetic and developmental principles for an artificial evolutionary system (AES) and reports the first simulation results. Emphasis is placed on those developmental processes which reduce the length of the genome to code for a given problem. We exemplify the usefulness of developmental processes with cell growth, cell differentiation and the creation of neural control structures which we used to control a real world autonomous agent. The importance of including developmental processes relies much on the fact that a neural network can be specified implicitly by using cell-to-cell communication. 1 Introduction In the field of autonomous agents different approaches have been studied: One of them, the evolutionary approach, aims to produce increasingly sophisticated autonomous agents with no need to care about the details of the robots control structure. As others,(Nolfi et al.,1994; Cangelosi et al.,1994; Daellert & Beer,1994; Harvey et al.,1995), we are convinc...