Morphological-Novelty in Modular Robot Evolution

I`m happy to announce that my first paper Morphological-Novelty in Modular Robot Evolution, has been accepted for presentation at the IEEE SSCI Conference 2023 in Mexico-City. This paper was based on my BSc Thesis, supervised by Prof. Dr. Guszti Eiben to whom im extremely grateful for his support and help in taking this study further. If you want to use the proposed novelty measure visiting Revolve2 on GitHub.

Abstract:

This study investigates how the introduction of morphological novelty affects the fitness and diversity of a population of modular robots. Novelty is usually measured in behavioral space, while the approach discussed in this paper assesses novelty solely using morphologies. The proposed algorithm is inspired by the histogram of oriented gradients, in combination with elements of principal component analysis, and the Wasserstein distance. The experiments conducted utilize novelty in parent selection, with different configurations. Analyzing the results, the introduction of morphological novelty promotes beneficial effects on fitness and diversity when applied correctly.