Practical hardware for evolvable robots.

The evolutionary robotics field offers the possibility of autonomously generating robots that are adapted to desired tasks by iteratively optimising across successive generations of robots with varying configurations until a high-performing candidate is found. The prohibitive time and cost of actually building this many robots means that most evolutionary robotics work is conducted in simulation, but to apply evolved robots to real-world problems, they must be implemented in hardware, which brings new challenges. This paper explores in detail the design of an example system for realising diverse evolved robot bodies, and specifically how this interacts with the evolutionary process.

Are the forearm muscles excited equally in different, professional piano players?

Background And Objectives: Professional pianists tend to develop playing-related musculoskeletal disorders mostly in the forearm. These injuries are often due to overuse, suggesting the existence of a common forearm region where muscles are often excited during piano playing across subjects. Here we use a grid of electrodes to test this hypothesis, assessing where EMGs with greatest amplitude are more likely to be detected when expert pianists perform different excerpts.

Real-World Evolution of Robot Morphologies: A Proof of Concept.

Evolutionary robotics using real hardware has been almost exclusively restricted to evolving robot controllers, but the technology for evolvable morphologies is advancing quickly. We discuss a proof-of-concept study to demonstrate real robots that can reproduce. Following a general system plan, we implement a robotic habitat that contains all system components in the simplest possible form.