Towards autonomous robot evolution

We outline a perspective on the future of evolutionary robotics and discuss a long-term vision regarding robots that evolve in the real world. We argue that such systems offer significant potential for advancing both science and engineering. For science, evolving robots can be used to investigate fundamental issues about evolution and the emergence of embodied intelligence. For engineering, artificial evolution can be used as a tool that produces good designs in difficult applications in complex unstructured environments with (partially) unknown and possibly changing conditions. This implies a new paradigm, second-order software engineering, where instead of directly developing a system for a given application, we develop an evolutionary system that will develop the target system for us. Importantly, this also holds for the hardware; with a complete evolutionary robot system, both the software and the hardware are evolved. In this chapter, we discuss the long-term vision, elaborate on the main challenges, and present the initial results of an ongoing research project concerned with the first tangible implementation of such a robot system.