Evolving Soft Locomotion in Aquatic and Terrestrial Environments: Effects of Material Properties and Environmental Transitions

Abstract Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges; automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multimaterial machines with very little or no human intervention. Evolutionary soft robotics is concerned with the application of optimization algorithms inspired by natural evolution to let soft robots (both their morphologies and controllers) spontaneously evolve within physically realistic simulated environments, figuring out how to satisfy a set of objectives defined by human designers. In this article, a powerful evolutionary system is put in place to perform a broad investigation on the free-form evolution of simulated walking and swimming soft robots in different environments. Three sets of experiments are reported, tackling different aspects of the evolution of soft locomotion. The first two explore the effects of different material properties on the evolution of terrestrial and aquatic soft locomotion: particularly, we show how ...