Overall, with this paper, we hope to draw attention on set of tools, methodologies, ideas and results, which may be relevant to researchers interested in plant-inspired robotics and intelligence.Īs robotic technology progresses, the main barriers to the creation of truly adaptive and intelligent robotic systems remain mostly conceptual ones. Particular emphasis will be on some unifying concepts that are thought to play an important role in the emergence of intelligent and adaptive behavior across both the animal and plant kingdoms, such as morphological computation and morphological developmental plasticity. After a general description of the system some case studies will be presented, focusing on the emergent properties of the evolved creatures. The adopted genetic encoding and simulation environment are particularly suitable in order to evolve distributed sensory and control systems, which play a particularly important role in plants. Different material properties can be simulated and optimized, from a continuum of soft/stiff materials, to the interconnection of heterogeneous structures, both found in animals and plants alike. In this regard, the system may offer a unique opportunity to explore differences and similarities between these two worlds. Whether the evolved creatures will resemble animals or plants is in general not known a priori, and depends on the specific task environment set up by the experimenter. By incorporating artificial evolutionary and developmental processes, the system allows to evolve complete creatures (brain, body, developmental properties, sensory, control system, etc.) for different task environments. In this paper, a comprehensive methodology and simulation framework will be reviewed, designed in order to study the emergence of adaptive and intelligent behavior in generic soft-bodied creatures. 3Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States.2Morphology, Evolution & Cognition Laboratory, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, United States.1The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy.

Nick Cheney 2,3 Sam Kriegman 2 Josh Bongard 2 Cecilia Laschi 1

Softness sims 4 skin