EPS 2014 - 3rd Workshop on the Evolution of Physical Systems

We use the term Evolution of Physical Systems (EPS) to refer to evolutionary algorithms which occur entirely in real-world physical substrates rather than in simulation. The term encompasses both parallel Embodied Evolution (Watson et al., 2002), in which evolution is distributed across a population of robots, as well as Evolutionary Robotics (Floreano and Mondada, 1994) where evaluation is serialized on a single robot. Notable examples of EPS occur across a wide variety of systems, ranging from Robotics (Zykov et al., 2004)] to FPGAs (Thompson, 1996) to 3D printers (Rieffel and Sayles, 2010). Although EPS comes at a cost (the speed of the real world, unlike CPUs, does not follow Moore's Law), by definition it avoids the "reality gap" imposed by simulation, and has produced novel and tangeable real-world results. Regardless of application or method, all implementations of EPS are bound by many of the same constraints and technical challenges. The aim of this full-day single-track workshop is to bring together researchers who are currently involved in the Evolution of Physical Systems, as well as those interested in the technique, in order to share ideas and innovations. As the frontiers of artificial life move from the computer to the petri dish, the Evolution of Physical Systems offers to provide inroads into domains which are otherwise impossible to simulate.