Heritability in Morphological Robot Evolution

Abstract: In the field of evolutionary robotics, choosing the correct encoding is very complicated, especially when robots evolve both behaviours and morphologies at the same time. With the objective of improving our understanding of the mapping process from encodings to functional robots, we introduce the biological notion of heritability, which captures the amount of phenotypic variation caused by genotypic variation. In our analysis we measure the heritability on the first generation of robots evolved from two different encodings, a direct encoding and an indirect encoding. In addition we investigate the interplay between heritability and phenotypic diversity through the course of an entire evolutionary process. In particular, we investigate how direct and indirect genotypes can exhibit preferences for exploration or exploitation throughout the course of evolution. We observe how an exploration or exploitation tradeoff can be more easily understood by examining patterns in heritability and phenotypic diversity. In conclusion, we show how heritability can be a useful tool to better understand the relationship between genotypes and phenotypes, especially helpful when designing more complicated systems where complex individuals and environments can adapt and influence each other.