First Three Generations of Evolved Robots

The field of robotics today faces an economic predicament: most problems in the physical world are too difficult for the current state of the art. The difficulties associated with designing, building and controlling robots have led to a stasis, and robots in industry are only applied to simple and highly repetitive manufacturing tasks. Over the last few years we have been trying to address this challenge through an alternative approach: Rather than a seeking an intelligent general-purpose robot, we are seeking the process that can automatically design and fabricate special purpose mechanisms and controllers to achieve specific short-term objectives. This short paper provides a brief review of three generations of our research results. Automatically designed high part-count static structures that are buildable, automatically designed and manufactured dynamic electromechanical systems, and modular robots automatically designed through generative encoding. We expect that with continued improvement in simulation, manufacturing, and transfer, we will achieve the ability to automatically design and fabricate custom machinery for short-term deployment on specific tasks.