Evolution park: A journey into a new dimension

You are about to enter another dimension, a journey into a land where robotic animals evolve before your eyes. As these new creatures come marching, swarming, swimming, and crawling toward you, you may feel like you’ve stepped into an episode of the old TV show The Twilight Zone. But you are in the evolutionary robotics laboratory in Michigan State University’s Engineering Building, where Professor Philip McKinley and his team are at work on a research project that is multidisciplinary and truly multidimensional -- 3-D to be exact.

You’ve just crossed over into Evolution Park: An Evolutionary Robotics Habitat for the Study of Crawling, Swimming, and Flying Creatures, supported by a $305,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

The centerpiece of this two-year grant, which was awarded this spring, is a 3-D printer that can print out robotic animals as well as other parts and assemblies more typically seen in manufacturing. Indeed, 3-D printing technology is spreading rapidly in many fields, from engineering, to medicine, to arts and entertainment.

“This grant enables us to build an infrastructure that will support a broad range of research projects,” says McKinley. “MSU is a perfect place to have this kind of facility because we already have an entire community of users -- within the college and across the university -- who will be able to take advantage of it.”

Evolution Park project researchers are McKinley, principal investigator and professor of computer science and engineering; co-principal investigator Xiaobo Tan, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering; and co-principal investigator Janette Boughman, associate professor of zoology. Boughman is an expert on stickleback fish, Tan’s work focuses on robotic fish, and McKinley is interested in evolutionary computation and building systems that can be sent out into the world to do a specific job. Together, they are constructing an elaborate environment for evolving creatures in a computer, printing them out using the 3-D printer, and studying them as they swim, crawl, and fly on their own.

“Our collaboration is built on biomutualism, or the idea that biology can inform engineering and robotics, and in turn, engineering and robotics can be used to understand biology,” says Boughman. Her role will be to conduct experiments with real stickleback fish -- threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus complex) -- to understand their social behavior, collective decision making, and social learning. She will also conduct experiments to better understand how the fish manage to swim so efficiently, by focusing on their body and fin shape and how that aids movements such as starting, stopping, turning, and station keeping (holding a position even when a current is flowing past them).

An earlier NSF grant in 2008 established the evolutionary robotics laboratory, which includes a compute cluster, several computers for simulations, a swarm of micro-robots, and a tank that holds 18 tons of water. The tank provides an environment for experiments with robotic fish. In addition to the 3-D printer, this new grant will be used to purchase additional computers for high-fidelity simulations, as well as several smaller tanks equipped with instrumentation for monitoring purposes.

“Evolution Park, an extension of a previous testbed, is a project that will provide a facility for studying autonomous systems, in particular those related to evolutionary design,” says Tan.

“Evolution has done a great job in the natural world. Now we are exploring what it can do with robotic systems,” says McKinley.

Evolutionary robotics, or using evolutionary computation to “design” the behavior of a robot and possibly its morphology, has been an area of interest for the past 20 years, according to McKinley.

But recently, across the country and right here at MSU, there is an increasing interest in evolutionary computing -- evidenced by the establishment last year of BEACON (Bio/computational Evolution in Action CONsortium), an NSF Science and Technology Center for the Study of Evolution in Action. Located in the Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building on the MSU campus, BEACON serves as a resource for academics, educators, and industry, performing basic research while helping create new technologies to solve real-world problems, ranging from the development of safer, more efficient cars, to systems that detect computer intrusions, to medical applications. This consortium includes four other universities: North Carolina A&T State University, the University of Idaho, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Washington.

McKinley refers to the “three pillars of BEACON” -- biological evolution, evolution harnessed for engineering, and then applying this artificial life technology to help better understand the evolutionary process in general.

“We’ve reached a point where computing can really serve us in this new area of engineering -- evolutionary design,” says McKinley.