The Evolution of Things: Beyond Evolutionary Robotics
Description
The main goal of the tutorial is to provide a broad and deep introduction to the evolution of embodied intelligence, that is, the evolution of embodied entities with autonomy. Robot evolution will serve as the natural implementation and the tutorial will review the history, the current state of the art and the main research directions to advance the field. An additional goal is to provide actionable advice about setting up a robot evolution project, elaborate on the (type of) questions such a project can address and review scientific tools for analyzing system behavior. I will demonstrate everything through a MuJoCo-based open source simulator ARIEL (Autonomous Robots through Integrated Evolution and Learning).
Organizers
Gusz Eiben
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Prof.Dr. A.E. Eiben is full professor of Artificial Intelligence on the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and visiting professor at the University of York. He is an internationally renowned expert in evolutionary computing who literally wrote the book (Eiben-Smith, Introduction to Evolutionary Computing, Springer, 2003, 2007, 2015). He is specialized in Evolutionary Robotics with papers in Nature, Nature Machine Intelligence, and Science Robotics. He is the head of the VUA’s Bio-Inspired Robotics lab, specialty chief editor of the Frontiers in AI and Robotics and editorial board member of several other journals. He has supervised several PhD theses on evolutionary robotics and collaborated in various international (EU and/or UK) research project in the area.