An evolutionary approach to damage recovery of robot motion with muscles

Abstract

Abstract. Robots that can recover from damage did not exist outside science fiction. Here we describe a self-adaptive snake robot that uses shape memory alloy as muscles and an evolutionary algorithm as a method of adaptive control. Experiments demonstrate that if some of the robot’s muscles are deliberately damaged, evolution is able to find new sequences of muscle activations that compensate, thus enabling the robot to recover its ability to move.