Taking inspiration from the navigation ability of humans, this study investigated a method of providing robotic controllers with a basic sense of position. It incorporated robotic simulators into robotic controllers to provide them with a mechanism t...
We introduce the framework of reality-assisted evolution to summarize a growing trend towards combining model-based and model-free approaches to improve the design of physically embodied soft robots. , data-driven models build, adapt, and improve rep...
The possibility of using competitive evolutionary algorithms to generate long-term progress is normally prevented by the convergence on limit cycle dynamics in which the evolving agents keep progressing against their current competitors by periodical...
A swarm robotic system is a system in which multiple robots cooperate to fulfill a macroscopic function. Many swarm robots have been developed for various purposes. This study aims to design swarm robots capable of executing spatially distributed tas...
We have developed autonomously moving pine-cone robots, which are made of multiple joined pine-cone scales for outdoor natural environments. We achieved these natural robots by using pine cones as both natural hygromorphic actuators and components of...
In many reinforcement learning tasks, the goal is to learn a policy to manipulate an agent, whose design is fixed, to maximize some notion of cumulative reward. The design of the agent's physical structure is rarely optimized for the task at hand. In...
Life and cognition are inherently circular dynamical processes, and people have difficulty understanding circular causation. I give case studies illustrating some resulting confusions, and propose that the problems may lie in failing to properly dist...
Engineers, control theorists, and neuroscientists often view the delay imposed by finite signal propagation velocities as a problem that needs to be compensated for or avoided. In this article, we consider the alternative possibility that in some cas...
We summarize the results and perspectives from a companion article, where we presented and evaluated an alternative architecture for data storage in distributed networks. We name the bio-inspired architecture RAIN, and it offers file storage service ...