c ○ Copyright American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), www.aaai.org On the Origin of Environments by Means of Natural Selection ∗

The field of adaptive robotics involves simulations and real-world implementations of robots which adapt to their environments. In this paper we introduce adaptive environmentics—the flip side of adaptive robotics—in which the environment adapts to the robot. To illustrate the approach we offer three simple experiments in which a genetic algorithm is used to shape an environment for a simulated Khepera robot. We then discuss at length the potential of adaptive environmentics, also delineating several possible avenues of future research