A Study on Morphological and Behavioral Adaptations from Multi-Task Morphoevolution by Voxel-based Soft Robots

This paper proposes to study the morphological and behavioral adaptations exhibited by voxel-based soft robots when evolved for and designed to solve multiple tasks. The voxel-based soft robots of Evolution Gym simulator has been used on Walker+Carrier, Walker+Thrower and Walker+Carrier+BridgeWalker tasks for the proposed study. Unlike the one robot one task practice in Evolutionary Robotics, this study suggests that evolution of robots for multiple tasks discourages the fragile co-adaptation between body and brain and hence deserves more study. The experiments indicate that diverse morphological and behavioral adaptations emerge when the underlying tasks have overlapping morphological and behavioral requirements. When the tasks are dissimilar, though the emerged adaptations have similarity, degrees of variations of such adaptations is still observed. While performance loss of evolved robots for multiple tasks against the single task counterparts have been observed, the emerged adaptations and traits are still encouraging.