Human breeders for evolving robots

In this article we describe a new approach in evolutionary robotics according to which human breeders are involved in the evolutionary process. While traditionally robots are selected to reproduce automatically according to a fitness formula, which is a quantitative and strictly defined measure, human breeders can operate selection based on qualitative criteria, and rewarding behaviors that can slip between the meshes woven by the fitness formula. In authors’ opinion this may bring advantages to the evolutionary robotics methodology, allowing the production of robots that display more, and more multiform, behaviors. In order to illustrate this approach, the software Breedbot was developed in which human breeders can intervene in evolving robots, complementing the automatic evaluation. After describing the software, some results on sample evolutionary processes are reported showing that the joint use of human and artificial selection on an exploration task generates robots with a higher performance and in a shorter time compared with the exclusive action of each breeding method. Future work will explore this hypothesis further. This work was presented in part at the First European Workshop on Artificial Life and Robotics, Vienna, Austria, July 12–13, 2007