EvoFab: A Fully Embodied Evolutionary Fabricator

Few evolved designs are subsequently manufactured into physical objects – the vast majority remain on the virtual drawing board. We suggest two sources of this “Fabrication Gap”. First, by being descriptive rather than prescriptive, evolutionary design runs the risk of evolving interesting yet unbuildable objects. Secondly, in a wide range of interesting and high-complexity design domains, such as dynamic and highly flexible objects, the gap between simulation and reality is too large to guarantee consilience between design and object. We suggest that one compelling alternative to evolutionary design in these complex domains is to avoid both simulation and description, and instead evolve artifacts directly in the real world. In this paper we introduce EvoFab: a fully embodied evolutionary fabricator, capable of producing novel objects (rather than virtual designs) in situ. EvoFab thereby opens the door to a wide range of incredibly exciting evolutionary design domains.