Unshackling Evolution: Evolving Soft Robots with Multiple Materials

Here we evolve the bodies of soft robots made of multiple materials (muscle, bone, & support tissue) to move quickly. Evolution produces a diverse array of fun, wacky, interesting, but ultimately functional soft robots. Enjoy! This video accompanies the following paper: Unshackling Evolution: Evolving Soft Robots with Multiple Materials and a Powerful Generative Encoding. Cheney, MacCurdy, Clune, & Lipson. Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. 2013. PDF: