Robot Evolution

“It’s a Bot-Eat-Bot World”

Insect expert Laurent Keller has become the first researcher to be able to experimentally address questions of evolution. In his lab at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, his team is using robots to condense thousands of years of evolution into days of experiment. Particularly, they are using robots to study the evolution of communication in species. Their results have been more enlightening than expected, showing how species evolve for survival from one generation to the next.
They call these small robots the “S-Bots,” which have been built so that each generation lasts two minutes. They stand only 15 cm tall and are equipped with lights, which can be turned on or off, and what Keller calls a virtual “genome.” This programming dictates their response to the environment that surrounds them.
The S-Bots were placed in an “environment” which consisted of a “food source” and a “poison source.” The methodology that follows is simple: robots that found the food source reproduced and passed their programming on to the next generation.
After 500 generations, equivalent to thousands of years of evolution, the robots had begun to communicate using their lights. Although some used them to signal food and others to warn of poison, the robots ultimately became much more efficient within their environment. Keller had expected the robots to act independently, largely unaffected by the existence of the other robots. However, not only did the robots develop a system of communication, they also became deceptive. Although the robots had managed to survive, they did so in different ways and with different programming. Robots with similar programming clearly favored each other, and even signaled “strange” robots incorrectly to decrease their chance for survival. They began to cooperate in communities, an evolution much more sophisticated than what was anticipated by researchers.
The results of this experiment were astounding. They have greatly amplified our understanding of social communication. Until now, we were limited to the evaluation of the results of the evolution of communication, but this research has allowed the evaluation of the process of this evolution. Understanding of this process is much more insightful and the information is more versatile to similar fields of research.
This experimental research that uses robots to observe social behavior, particularly the evolution of communication, is expanding our understanding of communication and widely expanding the possibilities for future research of social behavior and evolution. These robots make it possible for researchers to study thousands of years of evolution within the limits of a laboratory. Lee Dugatkin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Louisville finds the new research invigorating: “using robots to understand the evolution of communication opens the door. It has tremendous potential to address all sorts of questions that haven't been answered yet.”