Exploring Proprioceptive Feedback in the Evolution of Modular Robots

We investigate an evolvable robot system where the body provides proprioceptive sensory signals to the controller (brain) about the positions of the joints. The key aspect we consider is whether all joints should be sensed or if sensing fewer joints would be better. We research this matter based on a test suite of twenty-two robots with various shapes and sizes and implement a system where the controller and the sensory signal system evolve together. Experiments with this system show that the evolved solutions use signals only from a fraction of the joints (25–51%) and perform better than the baseline, where all signals are used. This effect was observed across the majority of the test suite.