Baby-Bots Teach Social Evolution

A new research field seems to be emerging -- the study of evolutionary conditions for the emergence of robot communication.

Biologists have long known the critical role communication plays in the development of social systems, but studying live animals is challenging, while evidence of social interaction is rarely evident in the fossil record. Fortunately, the study of robot social interaction has given researchers the tools they need to better understand how social creatures evolve to communicate -- and how, when pressed, they evolve to deceive as well.

Insect expert Laurent Kellerand and his team at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland equipped 15-centimeter-tall robots called s-bots with wheels, a camera, a ground sensor, and a virtual "genome" -- a computer program that controlled their responses to their environment. They conducted repeated trials of experimental evolution, and discovered that communication readily evolves when colonies consist of genetically similar individuals and when selection acts at the colony level. They identified several distinct communication systems with differing levels of efficiency. The study generated predictions about the evolutionary conditions conducive to the emergence of communication and provides guidelines for designing artificial evolutionary systems displaying spontaneous communication.

From Science