Evolving Flying Creatures with Path Following Behaviors

We present a system which evolves physically simulated 3D flying creatures and their maneuvers. The creature is modelled as a number of articulated cylinders connected by triangular patagia in between. A creature’s wing structure and its low-level controllers for straight flight are generated by an evolutionary algorithm. Then a feed-forward neural network is attached to the low-level controllers, and the connection weights of the network for a given trajectory are found by a genetic algorithm. We show that a control system sufficiently effective to allow aerial creatures to follow a complicated path can be achieved by two-step evolution process.

[1]  M. Anitescu,et al.  Formulating Dynamic Multi-Rigid-Body Contact Problems with Friction as Solvable Linear Complementarity Problems , 1997 .

[2]  A. D. Young,et al.  An Introduction to Fluid Mechanics , 1968 .

[3]  Zoran Popovic,et al.  Realistic modeling of bird flight animations , 2003, ACM Trans. Graph..

[4]  Jakub Wejchert,et al.  Animation aerodynamics , 1991, SIGGRAPH.

[5]  Karl Sims,et al.  Evolving 3d morphology and behavior by competition , 1994 .

[6]  D. Stewart,et al.  AN IMPLICIT TIME-STEPPING SCHEME FOR RIGID BODY DYNAMICS WITH INELASTIC COLLISIONS AND COULOMB FRICTION , 1996 .

[7]  Russell L. Smith,et al.  Intelligent motion control with an artificial cerebellum , 1998 .

[8]  P. Withers.  An Aerodynamic Analysis of Bird Wings as Fixed Aerofoils , 1981 .

[9]  W. Janna,et al.  Introduction to Fluid Mechanics , 2012 .

[10]  Gérard Dreyfus,et al.  REAL-TIME CONTROL OF AN AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE : A NEURAL NETWORK APPROACH TO THE PATH FOLLOWING PROBLEM , 1993 .

[11]  Thomas S. Ray.  Aesthetically Evolved Virtual Pets , 2001, Leonardo.

[12]  J. Ventrella.  Attractiveness vs. efficiency (how mate preference affects location in the evolution of artificial swimming organisms) , 1998 .

[13]  Karl Sims,et al.  Evolving virtual creatures , 1994, SIGGRAPH.

[14]  Kok Cheong Wong,et al.  Animating bird flight using aerodynamics , 1999, SIGGRAPH '99.

[15]  W. Oechel,et al.  Automatic design and manufacture of robotic lifeforms , 2022 .

[16]  Craig W. Reynolds.  Flocks, herds, and schools: a distributed behavioral model , 1998 .

[17]  Thomas J. Mueller,et al.  Fixed and Flapping Wing Aerodynamics for Micro Air Vehicle Applications , 2001 .

[18]  Maciej Komosinski,et al.  Framsticks: Towards a Simulation of a Nature-Like World, Creatures and Evolution , 1999, ECAL.

[19]  Chang-Hun Kim,et al.  Generating flying creatures using body-brain co-evolution , 2003, SCA '03.