Evolving Morphologies with CPPN-NEAT and a Dynamic Substrate

Richards, Daniel and Amos, Martyn (2014) Evolving Morphologies with CPPN-NEAT and a Dynamic Substrate. In: ALIFE 2014 - Fourteenth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, 30th July - 2nd August 2014, Manhattan, New York.

Preview

Text (Full text) Richards, Amos - Evolving morphologies with CPPN-NEAT and a dynamic substrate OA.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

Recent advances in fabrication technologies open up exciting opportunities to manufacture entirely new types of physical materials and structures. These have varied and specific mechanical properties, which can be exploited in a number of engineering applications, and a growing area of research concerns the generation of two- and three-dimensional designs using these materials. However, the computational tools required to explore large spaces of possible 2-D and 3-D morphologies remain underdeveloped. State-of-the-art evolutionary approaches such as CPPN-NEAT and HyperNEAT-LEO are often used to explore possible 2-D and 3-D designs, but their ability to construct efficient solutions for practical use in engineering domains remains in question. In this paper, we present an extension of CPPN-NEAT, in which nodes grow connections across a dynamic substrate, and illustrate this by creating efficient 2-D truss structures. Using four benchmark problems, we then demonstrate that our extended CPPN-NEAT model outperforms similar HyperNEAT methods for approximating specific connectivity patterns, and suggests important clues regarding how to best harness generative and developmental representations to build scalable and high-performance physical morphologies.

Actions (login required)

View Item

Downloads