Complex Behavior in Evolutionary Robotics

1 Introduction

Preamble: Nature has gained a huge variety of complex life forms which populate numerous biological niches all over the earth. The principles of natural selection, which are believed to be the main responsible forces driving the evolution of life on earth, seem to be a powerful mechanism capable of generating complexity in many different facets. But can artificial evolutionary approaches such as Evolutionary Robotics, which significantly simplify the biological mechanisms and work with population sizes and time periods incomparable to those in nature, also create truly complex structures? And can these structures, once evolved, be “reverse engineered” to provide an insight into their functioning? These are two major questions ...