204 citations · 495 across the 31 of their papers we have counts for
31 papers
Environmental resilience via morphological diversity within machines
Alice Hein, Josh Bongard
Organisms contain diverse, sensorimotor parts across size scales and rapidly adapt to new environments, while machines contain only inert materials at smaller scales and struggle w…
Efficient automatic design of robots
David Matthews, Andrew Spielberg, Daniela Rus +2
Robots are notoriously difficult to design because of complex interdependencies between their physical structure, sensory and motor layouts, and behavior. Despite this, almost ever…
Universal Mechanical Polycomputation in Granular Matter
Atoosa Parsa, Sven Witthaus, Nidhi Pashine +3
Unconventional computing devices are increasingly of interest as they can operate in environments hostile to silicon-based electronics, or compute in ways that traditional electron…
Selection for short-term empowerment accelerates the evolution of homeostatic neural cellular automata
Caitlin Grasso, Josh Bongard
Empowerment -- a domain independent, information-theoretic metric -- has previously been shown to assist in the evolutionary search for neural cellular automata (NCA) capable of ho…
Biological Robots: Perspectives on an Emerging Interdisciplinary Field
D. Blackiston, S. Kriegman, J. Bongard +1
Advances in science and engineering often reveal the limitations of classical approaches initially used to understand, predict, and control phenomena. With progress, conceptual cat…
Selecting Continuous Life-Like Cellular Automata for Halting Unpredictability: Evolving for Abiogenesis
Q. Tyrell Davis, Josh Bongard
Substantial efforts have been applied to engineer CA with desired emergent properties, such as supporting gliders. Recent work in continuous CA has generated a wide variety of comp…
Step Size is a Consequential Parameter in Continuous Cellular Automata
Q. Tyrell Davis, Josh Bongard
Step size in continuous cellular automata (CA) plays an important role in the stability and behavior of self-organizing patterns. Continous CA dynamics are defined by formula very…
Glaberish: Generalizing the continuously-valued Lenia framework to arbitrary Life-like cellular automata
Q. Tyrell Davis, Josh Bongard
Recent work with Lenia, a continuously-valued cellular automata (CA) framework, has yielded 100s of compelling, bioreminiscent and mobile patterns. Lenia can be viewed as a c…
Empowered Neural Cellular Automata
Caitlin Grasso, Josh Bongard
Information-theoretic fitness functions are becoming increasingly popular to produce generally useful, task-independent behaviors. One such universal function, dubbed empowerment,…
Evolving Programmable Computational Metamaterials
Atoosa Parsa, Dong Wang, Corey S. O'Hern +3
Granular metamaterials are a promising choice for the realization of mechanical computing devices. As preliminary evidence of this, we demonstrate here how to embed Boolean logic g…
A good body is all you need: avoiding catastrophic interference via agent architecture search
Joshua Powers, Ryan Grindle, Lapo Frati +1
In robotics, catastrophic interference continues to restrain policy training across environments. Efforts to combat catastrophic interference to date focus on novel neural architec…
Scale invariant robot behavior with fractals
Sam Kriegman, Amir Mohammadi Nasab, Douglas Blackiston +4
Robots deployed at orders of magnitude different size scales, and that retain the same desired behavior at any of those scales, would greatly expand the environments in which the r…
A soft robot that adapts to environments through shape change
Dylan S. Shah, Joshua P. Powers, Liana G. Tilton +3
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, rangin…
Scalable sim-to-real transfer of soft robot designs
Sam Kriegman, Amir Mohammadi Nasab, Dylan Shah +5
The manual design of soft robots and their controllers is notoriously challenging, but it could be augmented---or, in some cases, entirely replaced---by automated design tools. Mac…
Sim2real gap is non-monotonic with robot complexity for morphology-in-the-loop flapping wing design
Kent Rosser, Jia Kok, Javaan Chahl +1
Morphology of a robot design is important to its ability to achieve a stated goal and therefore applying machine learning approaches that incorporate morphology in the design space…
Embodiment dictates learnability in neural controllers
Joshua Powers, Ryan Grindle, Sam Kriegman +3
Catastrophic forgetting continues to severely restrict the learnability of controllers suitable for multiple task environments. Efforts to combat catastrophic forgetting reported i…
Word2vec to behavior: morphology facilitates the grounding of language in machines
David Matthews, Sam Kriegman, Collin Cappelle +1
Enabling machines to respond appropriately to natural language commands could greatly expand the number of people to whom they could be of service. Recently, advances in neural net…
Automated shapeshifting for function recovery in damaged robots
Sam Kriegman, Stephanie Walker, Dylan Shah +3
A robot's mechanical parts routinely wear out from normal functioning and can be lost to injury. For autonomous robots operating in isolated or hostile environments, repair from a…
Neural language representations predict outcomes of scientific research
James P. Bagrow, Daniel Berenberg, Joshua Bongard
Many research fields codify their findings in standard formats, often by reporting correlations between quantities of interest. But the space of all testable correlates is far larg…
Combating catastrophic forgetting with developmental compression
Shawn L. E. Beaulieu, Sam Kriegman, Josh C. Bongard
Generally intelligent agents exhibit successful behavior across problems in several settings. Endemic in approaches to realize such intelligence in machines is catastrophic forgett…
Interoceptive robustness through environment-mediated morphological development
Sam Kriegman, Nick Cheney, Francesco Corucci +1
Typically, AI researchers and roboticists try to realize intelligent behavior in machines by tuning parameters of a predefined structure (body plan and/or neural network architectu…
Morphology dictates a robot's ability to ground crowd-proposed language
Zahra Mahoor, Jack Felag, Josh Bongard
As more robots act in physical proximity to people, it is essential to ensure they make decisions and execute actions that align with human values. To do so, robots need to underst…
Evolving soft locomotion in aquatic and terrestrial environments: effects of material properties and environmental transitions
Francesco Corucci, Nick Cheney, Francesco Giorgio-Serchi +2
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material mac…
How morphological development can guide evolution
Sam Kriegman, Nick Cheney, Josh Bongard
Organisms result from adaptive processes interacting across different time scales. One such interaction is that between development and evolution. Models have shown that developmen…