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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Robot. AI
Sec. Robot Learning and Evolution
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frobt.2024.1278983
This article is part of the Research Topic Autonomous (re)Production, Learning and Bio-inspired Robotics Workshop View all 4 articles

Can Evolutionary Robotics address questions in Evolutionary Biology?

Provisionally accepted
Alan F. Winfield Alan F. Winfield *
  • University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The use of evolutionary robotic systems to model aspects of evolutionary biology is well established. Yet few studies have asked the question ‘what kind of model is an evolutionary robotic system?’. This paper seeks to address that question in several ways. First by applying a structured model description developed for physical robot models of animal sensorimotor systems. Then by outlining the strengths and limitations of evolutionary robotics for modelling evolutionary biology. And finally by considering the deepest questions in evolution and which of these might feasibly be modelled by evolutionary robotics.

    Keywords: Evolutionary Robotics, Evolutionary Biology, Synthetic method, Robots as scientific instruments, model description

    Received: 17 Aug 2023; Accepted: 06 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Winfield. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Alan F. Winfield, University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom

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