[ODE] Evolved behaviours

[Joshua Bongard]

As there seems to be quite a bit of discussion about NNs and evolved
behaviours on the mailing list these days, I'd like to direct your
attention to a physical simulation overlay I developed called MorphEngine
(www.ifi.unizh.ch/ailab/people/bongard/MorphEngine/). For those of you in
the know, and before you start throwing rotten fruit at me, this overlay
uses MathEngine, not ODE, but I've almost finished porting it to ODE, and
will post it up when I do. The program runs as an .exe standalone on
Windows, but my documentation includes a brief introduction to NNs, GAs
and evolved behaviours, and how they relate to the physical simulation of
robots.

Cheers,
Josh

 On Thu, 10 Oct 2002, Nate W wrote:

> On Thu, 10 Oct 2002, Ian Munro wrote:
>
> > My interests actually lie in making physical robots rather than simulations,
> > but they're a great "what if?" tool.
>
> Be careful...  That's exactly how I felt when I started planning the
> software that became Juice.  Now I've lost all interest in making
> something I can touch. :-)
>
> I'm really enjoying the discussion of evolved behaviors.  In Juice, a
> creature's movements are basically just sine waves of different phases and
> amplitudes applied to joints, and feedback loops from a body's orientation
> to one or more joints.  I've been pondering a training feature to try
> using a GA to adjust the phases, amplitudes, and gains, but haven't
> actually implemented anything yet.  I'm hoping it will smooth out gaits
> that have been designed by hand.
>
> I've come to the conclusion that this method of programming behavior
> creates creatures that tip over too easily though, so most of my time
> lately has gone into designing a new behavior programming language.
>
>

-- 
__________________________________________________________
Josh C. Bongard
Doctoral candidate, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Department of Information Technology, University of Zurich
Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057 Zurich, Switzerland
Phone: +41 01 635 43 47
Fax:   +41 01 635 68 09
www.ifi.unizh.ch/ailab/people/bongard/
__________________________________________________________