Generative Representations for Design Automation

3D Genobots

Gregory S. Hornby
hornby@cs.brandeis.edu
Dynamic & Evolutionary Machine Organization Lab

Hierarchically-Modular 3D Locomoting Genobots

Here we evolve both the morphology and the controllers for different robots. The system for generating designs consists of the design builder and simulator, the L-system module and the evolutionary algorithm. The design builder takes a decoded build sequence and generates a robot and controller. Once built, the robot's movement is simulated for a fixed amount of time and evaluated for distance. This distance is the basis of a fitness function for the evoluationary algorithm to evolve the L-systems.

gbot_kayak.avi (8.8M)

gbot_quatro1.mov (600k)

Genobots constructed with the help of: Hod Lipson, John Rieffel, and Jordan Pollack.

For the following creatures, blue is drawn for bars ending in non-actuated joints and green for bars ending in actuated joints -- with dark green stars at the actuated joints.

Rolling Cloverleafs (1.7M)

Undulating Serpent (1.7M)

Rolling Rectangles (2.2M)

An animation of several of these oscillator-network controlled robots: genobots3d.mpg (1.7M).

These robots are controlled with neural networks:

(5.8M)	(5.8M)
(5.8M)	(5.8M)

An animation of several of these neural-network controlled robots: geno_net.mpg (5.8M).

For the following genobots, green is drawn for bars ending in non-actuated joints and blue for bars ending in actuated joints.

Kayaker	Twister	M
Paddlewheel Roller	An Inchworm with stabilizing arms.	Rolling Tree

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hornby@cs.brandeis.edu - Last modified: June 12, 2003