The Impact of the Robot's Morphology in the Collective Transport

摘要

The idea of this research is to evolve the shape of robots within a swarm, in order for them to work better as a whole. Small robots are not so powerful individually, but when cooperating with each other, by physically hooking together forming a larger organism for example, they may be able to solve more complex tasks. The shape each robot has influences the way they physically interact and, taking advantage of the morphological computation phenomenon, I show that evolving the robots' morphology in a swarm makes it more efficient for the task of transporting objects, even in comparison to evolving the robot's controller. In order to fulfill this objective, I have evolved the shape of armlike structures for the robots' bodies and their controller separately, and compared the results with control experiments.