Morphogenetic Evolvable Hardware Controllers for Robot Walking

We propose to develop reactive robot leg controllers in hardware using a morphogenetic approach that incorporates both evolutionary and developmental processes. Evolvable hardware has been crippled by issues of scalability and viability of evolved designs that arise when evolving complex circuits on modern mainstream field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). To overcome these limitations requires a shift away from direct encodings of the FPGA configuration to encoding a growth process, morphogenesis, thus moving the complexity from the genotype to the genotype-phenotype mapping. Although a few researchers have attempted this, how to successfully apply morphogenesis to evolvable hardware still remains an open question.