- title = "Artificial Life and Real Robots",
- year = "1992",
- pages = "3--10",
- author = "Rodney A. Brooks",
- booktitle = "Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life",
- editor = "Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine",
- address = "Cambridge, MA, USA",
- publisher = "MIT Press",
- keywords = "genetic algorithms, genetic programming",
-
URL = "
http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/real-robots.pdf",
- size = "9 pages",
-
abstract = "The first part of this paper explores the general
issues in using Artificial Life techniques to program
actual mobile robots. In particular it explores the
difficulties inherent in transferring programs evolved
in a simulated environment to run on an actual robot.
It examines the dual evolution of organism morphology
and nervous systems in biology. It proposes techniques
to capture some of the search space pruning that dual
evolution offers in the domain of robot programming. It
explores the relationship between robot morphology and
program structure, and techniques for capturing
regularities across this mapping.
The second part of the paper is much more specific. It proposes techniques which could allow realistic explorations concerning the evolution of programs to control physically embodied mobile robots. In particular we introduce a new abstraction for behaviour-based robot programming which is specially tailored to be used with genetic programming techniques. To compete with hand coding techniques it will be necessary to automatically evolve programs that are one to two orders of magnitude more complex than those previously reported in any domain. Considerable extensions to previously reported approaches to genetic programming are necessary in order to achieve this goal.",
