On the Relationship Between Environmental and Mechanical Complexity in Evolved Robots

According to the principles of embodied cognition, intelligent behavior must arise out of the coupled dynamics of an agent’s brain, body, and environment. This suggests that the morphological complexity of a robot should scale in relation to the complexity of its task environment. This idea is supported by recent work, which demonstrated that when evolving robot morphologies in simple and complex task environments more complex robot morphologies do tend to evolve in more complex task environments. Here this idea is extended to examining the mechanical complexity of evolved robots. Counter to intuition it is found that the mechanical complexity decreases in more complex task environments.