The Journal focuses on Evolvable Hardware, Evolutionary Robotics, and Physics of Computation. Artificial evolution can operate upon reconfigurable electronic circuits to produce efficient and powerful control systems for autonomous mobile robots. Evolving physical hardware instead of control systems simulated in software results in more than just a raw speed increase: it is possible to exploit the physical properties of the implementation (such as the semiconductor physics of integrated circuits) to obtain control circuits of unprecedented power. The space of these evolvable circuits is far larger than the space of solutions in which a human designer works, because to make design tractable, a more abstract view than that of detailed physics must be adopted. To allow circuits to be designed at this abstract level, constraints are applied to the designs that limit how the natural dynamical behaviour of the components is reflected in the overall behaviour of the system. This paper reasons that these constraints can be removed when using artificial evolution, releasing huge potential even from small circuits. Experimental evidence is given for this argument, including the first reported evolution of a real hardware control system for a real robot.

Evolvable hardware is a reconfigurable electronic circuit, which can be changed by an adaptive process such as a genetic algorithm. This paper considers the evolution of hardware to control an autonomous mobile robot; initially by examining exactly what evolvable hardware is, and what its advantages over software systems are, and then by concentrating on one of these benefits: the exploitation of the physics of the implementation, and how this may be maximized. Finally, early results are presented for the first ever evolution of real hardware to control a real robot, which benefits from the change of perspective that I claim evolvable hardware, justifies.

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Journal of Industrial Electronics and Applications
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