Evolving Locomotion for a Simulated 12-DOF Quadruped Robot

We demonstrate the power of evolutionary robotics (ER) by comparing to a more traditional approach its performance and cost on the task of simulated robot locomotion. A novel quadruped robot is presented, the legs of which --- each having three non-coplanar degrees of freedom --- are very maneuverable. Using a simplistic control architecture and a physics simulation of the robot, gaits are designed both by hand and using a highly parallel evolutionary algorithm (EA). It is found that the EA produces, in a small fraction of the time that takes to design by hand, gaits that travel at nearly twice the speed of the hand-designed one.