Evolving A Robot Controller in Hardware

In this paper, the concept of hardware evolution is presented along with a newer approach to hardware evolution termed Complete Hardware Evolution (CHE). An experimental robot controller design --- GERC (Genetically Evolved Robot Controller), is described which uses CHE in the design process. The robot controller steers the robot around a given area trying to move as straight and as far as possible, exhibiting wall avoidance behaviour. By using CHE the whole evolution process is implemented on the same chip as the evolved circuit --- the robot steering circuitry. No external interaction is thus required to evaluate the robots behaviour during the evolution process.