Morphogenetic Robotics

Definition of Morphogenetic Robotics

Morphogenetic robotics was first coined by Yaochu Jin and Yan Meng in a project discussion in September 2009 and then elaborated in [3]. It generally refers to the methodologies that address challenges in robotics inspired by biological morphogenesis. Morphogenetic robotics (MR) includes, but is not limited to the following main topics:
• Morphogenetic swarm robots that deals with the self-organization of multi-robots using genetic and cellular mechanisms governing the biological early morphogenesis [1,5].
• Morphogenetic modular robots where modular robots adapt their configuration autonomously using morphogenetic principles [10].
• Developmental approaches to the design of the body plan of robots, such as sensors and actuators, as well as the design of the controller, e.g., a neural controller using a generative coding [2] or a gene regulatory network model [2,6].

Morphogenetic robotics is related to epigenetic robotics. The main difference between morphogenetic robotics and epigenetic robotics is that the former focuses on self-organization, self-reconfiguration and self-adaptive control of robots using genetic and cellular mechanisms inspired from biological early morphogenesis (activity-independent development), during which the body and controller of the organisms are developed simultaneously, whereas the latter emphasizes the cognitive development in robotic systems, such as language, emotion and social skills, through experience during the lifetime (activity-dependent development). Research topics covered by epigenetic robotics are also termed as autonomous mental development or cognitive developmental robotics.

In biology, the term epigenetic can be derived from either epigenesis that describes morphogenesis and postnatal developmental of organisms, or from epigenetics, which refers to phenotypic changes or change in gene expression which are caused by non-genetic changes, such as DNA methylation, RNA silencing and histone modifications. To avoid confusion, developmental cognitive robotics has also been suggested. Finally, we believe that morphogenetic robotics, which is concerned with physical development of robots, and epigenetic robotics, which is responsible for mental development of robots, should as a whole lay the main foundations for developmental robotics.

Towards Evolutionary Developmental Robotics

We believe that evolutionary robotics and developmental robotics, two distinct yet complementary disciplines in robotics, should also integrate and form a new discipline: evolutionary developmental robotics , evo-devo-robo for short.


Related Events

• IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, Special Issue on Computational Modeling of Brain and Nervous Development. Submission deadline: Oct. 31, 2010.
• Workshop on Bio-Inspired Self-Organizing Robotic Systems, within the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Anchorage, Alaska, May 3-8, 2010
• A Wiki article on Evolutionary developmental robotics was created by Yaochu Jin on December 1, 2009
• Special issue on "Morphogenetic robotics", IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, 2010 (Invited contributions only)
• Special Session on Bio-Inspired Self-Organizing Multi-Agent Systems, WCCI 2010, July 18-23,2010, Barcelona, Spain
• Special issue on Evolving Developmental Systems, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation. Submission deadline: April 30, 2010
• A Wiki article on Morphogenetic robotics was created by Yaochu Jin on October 12, 2009
• Ninth International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems Venice, Italy, November 12-14, 2009


References

1. H. Guo, Y. Meng, and Y. Jin. A cellular mechanism for multi-robot construction via evolutionary multi-objective optimization of a gene regulatory network. BioSystems, 98(3):193-203, 2009
   
2. G.S. Hornby and J.B. Pollack. Body-brain co-evolution using L-systems as a generative encoding. Artificial Life, 8:3, 2002
   
3. Y. Jin and Y. Meng. Morphogenetic robotics: An emerging new field in developmental robotics. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Reviews and Applications, 2010 (accepted)
4. J.A. Lee and J. Sitte. Morphogenetic Evolvable Hardware Controllers for Robot Walking. In: 2nd International Symposium on Autonomous Minirobots for Research and Edutainment (AMiRE 2003), Feb. 18-20, 2003, Brisbane, Australia
5. M. Mamei, M. Vasirani, F. Zambonelli, Experiments in morphogenesis in swarms of simple mobile robots. Applied Artificial Intelligence, 18, 9-10: 903-919, 2004 6. M Mazzapioda, A. Cangelosi, S. Nolfi. Evolving morphology and control: A distributed approach. IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. Page(s):2217 - 2224, 18-21 May 2009
6. I. Salazar-Ciudad, H. Garcia-Fernandez, and R. V. Sole. Gene networks capable of pattern formation: from induction to reaction-diffusion. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 205:587-603, 2000>br />
7. W. Shen, P. Will and A. Galstyan. Hormone-inspired self-organization and distributed control of robotic swarms. Autonomous Robots, 17, pp.93-105, 2004
8. T. Taylor. A genetic regulatory network-inspired real-time controller for a group of nnderwater robots. Proceedings of Eighth Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-8), 2004
9. L. Wolpert. Principles of Development. Oxford University Press, 2002
10. Y. Meng, Y. Zheng and Y. Jin. # Autonomous self-reconfiguration of modular robots by evolving a hierarchical mechnochemical model. IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, 2010 (accepted)

Copyright©2009-2010. Last update in February, 2010 by Yaochu Jin. All rights reserved. The views expressed on this home page are personal and do NOT necessarily reflect the views of his employer.