Generative Representations for Design Automation

2D Genobots

Gregory S. Hornby hornby@cs.brandeis.edu Dynamic & Evolutionary Machine Organization Lab

Hierarchically Regular Locomoting Robots (Genobots)

Here we evolve both the morphology and the controllers for different robots. The system for generating designs consists of the design builder and simulator, the L-system module and the evolutionary algorithm. The design builder takes a decoded build sequence and generates a robot and controller. Once built, the robot's movement is simulated for a fixed amount of time and evaluated for distance. This distance is the basis of a fitness function for the evoluationary algorithm to evolve the L-systems.

A constructed genobot:

gbot_m.avi (11.3M)

Step 1	Step 2	Step 3	Step 4
Step 1	Step 2	Step 3	Step 4

m-walker.mpg

tbot_m.avi (11M)

Sophia - Walking Star 43 bars, 24 actuated joints.	'Lil Rolly - Rolling Circle 20 bars, 8 actuated joints.	Roland - Rolling Triangle 67 bars, 28 actuated joints.
Inchworm #1 30 bars, 8 actuated joints.	Inchworm #2 73 bars, 7 actuated joints.	Inchworm #3 23 bars, 10 actuated joints.
Inchworm #4 24 bars, 12 actuated joints.	Reindeer 25 bars, 7 actuated joints.	Walking M 13 bars, 6 actuated joints.
Scorpion 27 bars, 6 actuated joints.	Dragon 143 bars, 16 actuated joints.	Giant Serpent 164 bars, 61 actuated joints.