Autonomous evolution of gaits with the Sony Quadruped Robot

Abstract

A trend in robotics is towards legged robots. One of the issues with legged robots is the development of gaits. Typically gaits are developed manually. In this paper we report our results of autonomous evolution of dynamic gaits for the Sony Quadruped Robot. Fitness is determined using the robot's digital camera and infrared sensors. Using this system we evolve faster dynamic gaits than previously manually developed. 1 INTRODUCTION In this paper we present an implementation of an autonomous evolutionary algorithm (EA) for developing locomotion gaits. All processing is handled by the robot's onboard computer and individuals are evaluated using the robot's sensors. Our implementation successfully evolves trot and pace gaits for our robot for which the pace gait significantly outperforms previous hand-developed gaits. In addition to achieving our desired goal of automatically developing gaits these results show that EAs can be used on real robots to evolve non-trivial behaviors. A method...