EDR 2012 - Workshop on Evolutionary Developmental Robotics

Developmental robotics (also known as epigenetic robotics) is mainly concerned with modelling the postnatal development of cognitive behaviours in living systems, such as language, emotion, curiosity, anticipation, and social skills. While current work in this field has shown significant successes, several aspects can be added to go even further. First, ontogenetically, mental development is based on and closely coupled with physical development of an organism, including development of both the body plan and the nervous systems. Autonomous mental development in living system was gradually shaped by a brain-body co-evolution embedded in a changing environment. The introduction of morphogenetic robotics addresses this first challenge in developmental robotics to a certain extent by integrating mental and physical development. Second, biological evidence suggests that autonomous mental development is driven by intrinsic motivational systems among others. Current robotic systems have a predefined intrinsic motivation system. However, the evolutionary origin that accounts for both physical and mental development is still missing. Evolutionary robotics applies evolutionary algorithms to the automatic design of neural controllers for autonomous robots without considering the role of development. Thus, integrating research on developmental (including epigenetic and morphogenetic) robotics and evolutionary robotics is the natural next step. Developmental plasticity can not only bias evolution, but also enhance evolvability by maintaining genetic diversity in changing environments and resolving robustness-variability trade-off. Therefore, we believe that it is high time to bring together evolutionary robotics and developmental robotics to form a new discipline evolutionary developmental robotics (evo-devo-robo).
This half-day workshop aims to bring toget her new theories and methodologies inspired by biological principles for evolutionary developmental robotics. The emphasis of the workshop is on bridging multi-disciplinary research areas, in particular evolutionary robotics, epigenetic robotics, developmental robotics, evolutionary developmental systems, artificial life, systems and developmental biology, cognitive science, and computational neuroscience. Topics of this workshop include, but are not limited to:
Evolutionary and developmental approaches to design of robot body plan and controller
Morphogenetic approaches to self-organizing multi-robot systems
Morphogenetic reconfiguration of modular robots
Evolution of neural and morphological development in robotic systems
Evolution of self-organising multi-robot systems
Neuro-cognitive development
Interactions between evolution, learning and development
Computational modelling of neural plasticity and neural development
Evolutionary and developmental approaches to autonomous learning systems
The targeted audiences are researchers and students who are interested in this emerging new evo-devo-robo area, in particular evolutionary and developmental approaches to the design of robot body-plan and controller as well as cognitive development. This workshop not only fills the gap between the GDS track and Evolutionary Robotics track in GECCO, but also attracts researchers from epigenetic robotics, thus forming a new research area on evo-devo-robo.