Evolutionary Machine Organization Lab Overview A trend in robotics is towards legged robots. One of the issues with legged robots is the development of gaits. Typically gaits are developed manually. In this project we report our results of autonomous evolution of dynamic gaits for the Sony Entertainment Robot, AIBO and its prototype.
Fitness is determined using the robot's digital camera and infrared sensors.
Evolved gaits are faster than those created by hand. Motivation Three reasons for studying automatic acquisition of gaits are for re-developing gaits for new robots, transferring gaits from one version of a robot to a new version, and for finding gaits that would not have been discovered by people. It was necessary to re-develop gaits for the new robot. During the development of AIBO, our lab created several prototypes. With each new hardware version of AIBO, some gaits did not perform well.