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Abstract:

As the embodied cognitive science perspective gains acceptance, increasingly the importance of morphology in cognition is advocated by cognitive scientists. In evolutionary robotics, this has led to a number of experiments where morphological parameters are evolved in parallel with the control structure. However, often these experiments entail highly embodied solutions, or do not explore the relative importance of embodied solutions compared to less embodied solutions. In this report a number of experiments were carried out where agents could evolve highly embodied, or less embodied solutions. In this manner we could understand in this virtual context the relative importance of embodied solutions. It turned out that agents typically used highly embodied solutions, coupled with very simple controllers, as these are generally easier to evolve. By comparing runs with evolvable morphologies and randomly initialised static morphologies, we found that evolvable morphologies did not appear to afford a significant statistical advantage. Evolvable morphological parameters appeared to result in a more robust evolutionary search, but not enough to provide a significant advantage: generally some of the randomly initialised static morphologies were adequate. However, given this results, it seems it may prove

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