neural networks research group
areas
people
projects
demos
publications
software/data
Trading Control Intelligence for Physical Intelligence: Muscle Drives in Evolved Virtual Creatures (2014)
Author: Dan Lessin, Don Fussell, Risto Miikkulainen
Traditional evolved virtual creatures (Sims, 1994) are actuated using unevolved, uniform, invisible drives at joints between rigid segments. In contrast, this paper shows how such conventional actuators can be replaced by evolvable muscle drives that are a part of the creature's physical structure. Such a muscle-drive system replaces control intelligence with meaningful morphological complexity. For instance, the experiments in this paper show that control intelligence sufficient for locomotion or jumping can be moved almost entirely from the brain into the musculature of evolved virtual creatures. This design is important for two reasons: First, the control intelligence is made visible in the purposeful development of muscle density, orientation, attachment points, and size. Second, the complexity that needs to be evolved for the brain to control the actuators is reduced, and in some cases can be essentially eliminated, thus freeing brain power for higher-level functions. Such designs may thus make it possible to create more complex behavior than would otherwise be achievable.
People
Dan Lessin
Ph.D. Alumni
dlessin [at] cs utexas edu
Projects
Learning Strategic Behavior in Sequential Decision Tasks
2009 - 2014
Publications
Trading Control Intelligence for Physical Intelligence: Muscle Drives in Evolved Virtual Creatures
Dan Lessin, Don Fussell, Risto Miikkulainen
To Appear In
Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) 2014
,...
2014
Evolved Virtual Creatures as Content: Increasing Behavioral and Morphological Complexity
Dan Lessin
PhD Thesis, Computer Science Department, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, December ...
2014
Neuroevolution Insights Into Biological Neural Computation
Risto Miikkulainen
To Appear In
Science
, 2024.
2024
Neuroevolution: Harnessing Creativity in AI Model Design
Sebastian Risi, David Ha, Yujin Tang, Risto Miikkulainen
To Appear In , Cambridge, MA, 2025. MIT Press.
2025
Areas of Interest
Evolutionary Computation
Neuroevolution
Artificial Life