Sam Kriegman
Sam Kriegman co-authored work on evolving soft robots in simulation and on designing living systems with an evolutionary algorithm. In 2018 the team reported that robots which developed during their lifetime outran robots which did not2. In 2020 they described a pipeline from simulated design to manufactured cell-based organisms3. Later authors cited this work on plasticity6.
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- 3 works, named in 5 passages elsewhere
Development in soft robots
Kriegman, Cheney and Bongard tested simulated soft robots built from a 4 × 4 × 3 grid of voxels on a locomotion task over flat terrain. Each robot lived for ten seconds1. Across 30 trials, robots evolved without development moved at about one body length per second. Robots that also developed moved at over five2. When development was removed from the evolved developing robots, they lost only a slight, non-significant amount of median speed. The advantage was therefore not a trick of changing bodies2.
From simulation to organisms
The 2020 paper set out a linear pipeline. It took a description of the biological building blocks and the desired behaviour, and produced designs that could be manufactured from cells3. Designs came from 100 independent evolutionary trials, selected on net displacement over 10 seconds with randomized contraction4. The built organisms showed the evolved structure and behaviour, even though the timing of heart muscle cells was modelled as random noise. Selection had derandomized the morphologies5.
Later use and limits
The 2023 perspective, which lists Kriegman among its authors, is more cautious about the resulting xenobots. It says their cells can sense and act, but the whole organism shows no sense-guided behaviour. Their movement fits blind, open-loop actuation7.
We consider a locomotion task, over flat terrain, for soft robots composed of a 4 × 4 × 3 grid of voxels (Fig. 1). Robots are evaluated for 40 actuation cycles at 4 Hz, yielding a lifetime of ten seconds.
Kriegman S, Cheney N, Bongard J, 2018 · How morphological development can guide evolution · open at passage 12the non-developmental robots (Evo) tend to move on average with a speed of 10 body lengths in 10 seconds, or 1 length/sec. The evolved and developing robots (Evo-Devo) tend to move at over 5 lengths/sec
Kriegman S, Cheney N, Bongard J, 2018 · How morphological development can guide evolution · open at passage 18Here, we demonstrate a scalable approach for designing living systems in silico using an evolutionary algorithm, and we show how the evolved designs can be rapidly manufactured using a cell-based construction toolkit.
Kriegman S, Blackiston D, Levin M, Bongard J, 2020 · A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms · open at passage 4designs were selected based on net displacement achieved during a 10-s period (with randomized, phase-modulated contraction, cycling at 2 Hz).
Kriegman S, Blackiston D, Levin M, Bongard J, 2020 · A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms · open at passage 12As a side effect of selection pressure for locomotion, derandomizing morphologies evolved: evolutionary improvement occurred through changes in overall shape
Kriegman S, Blackiston D, Levin M, Bongard J, 2020 · A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms · open at passage 18The plasticity and goal-directedness of modules (as opposed to hardwired patterns) serve to reduce the sim-to-real gap (Kriegman et al., 2020b)
Levin M, 2022 · Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework… · open at passage 102All the cells within a xenobot can sense and act and talk to their neighbors, but xenobots as a whole do not exhibit perceptive (sense-guided) behavior
Blackiston D, Kriegman S, Bongard J, Levin M, 2023 · Biological Robots: Perspectives on an Emerging Interdisciplinary Field · open at passage 23
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