Evolving Controller Symmetry for Multilegged Robots (2010)
Author: Vinod Valsalam
The videos linked below demonstrate the walking behaviors evolved by five neuroevolution methods, which differ only in the way they determine controller symmetry: (1) Evolving symmetry systematically using ENSO, (2) evolving symmetry randomly without using the group-theory mechanisms of ENSO, (3) using fixed S4 symmetry during evolution (i.e. maximal symmetry), (4) using fixed D2 symmetry during evolution, and (5) using direct encoding without symmetry constraints (which is equivalent to using the fixed trivial symmetry during evolution). The videos linked below demonstrate the walking behaviors evolved by five neuroevolution methods, which differ only in the way they determine controller symmetry: (1) Evolving symmetry systematically using ENSO, (2) evolving symmetry randomly without using the group-theory mechanisms of ENSO, (3) using fixed S4 symmetry during evolution (i.e. maximal symmetry), (4) using fixed D2 symmetry during evolution, and (5) using direct encoding without symmetry constraints (which is equivalent to using the fixed trivial symmetry during evolution).

Demo website
Vinod Valsalam Ph.D. Alumni vkv [at] alumni utexas net
Risto Miikkulainen Faculty risto [at] cs utexas edu
Machines Are Becoming More Creative Than Humans 2016
Risto Miikkulainen, VentureBeat, Vol. 2016/04/03 (2016).
IJCNN-2013 Tutorial on Evolution of Neural Networks 2013
Risto Miikkulainen, To Appear In unpublished. Tutorial slides..
Utilizing Symmetry in Evolutionary Design 2010
Vinod Valsalam, PhD Thesis, Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin. Technical Report AI-10-04.
Evolving Symmetric and Modular Neural Network Controllers for Multilegged Robots 2009
Vinod K. Valsalam and Risto Miikkulainen, In xploring New Horizons in Evolutionary Design of Robots: Workshop at the 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2009.
Evolving Symmetric and Modular Neural Networks for Distributed Control 2009
Vinod K. Valsalam and Risto Miikkulainen, In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), pp. 731--738 2009.
Modular Neuroevolution for Multilegged Locomotion 2008
Vinod K. Valsalam and Risto Miikkulainen, In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference GECCO 2008, pp. 265-272, New York, NY, USA 2008. ACM.
ENSO This package contains software implementing the ENSO approach for evolving symmetric modular neural networks. It also in... 2010