Leonardo and Discipulus Simplex: An Autonomous, Evolvable Six-Legged Walking Robot

Evolutionary systems based on genetic algorithms (GAs) are common nowadays. One of the recent uses of such systems is in the burgeoning eld of evolvable hardware which involves, among others, the use of FPGAs as a platform on which evolution takes place. In this paper, we describe the implementation of Discipulus Simplex, an autonomous evolvable system that controls the walking of our six-legged robot Leonardo. Discipulus Simplex is based on GAs and logic system recon guration, and is implemented into a single FPGA. As a result, we obtained a fully autonomous robot which is able to learn to walk with the aid of on-line evolvable hardware without any processors or o -line computation.