Abstract
Recent advances in fabrication technologies open up exciting opportunities to manufacture entirely new types of physical materials and structures. These have varied and specific mechanical properties, which can be exploited in a number of engineering applications, and a growing area of research concerns the generation of two- and three-dimensional designs using these materials. However, the computational tools required to explore large spaces of possible 2-D and 3-D morphologies remain underdeveloped. State-of-the-art evolutionary approaches such as CPPN-NEAT and HyperNEAT-LEO are often used to explore possible 2-D and 3-D designs, but their ability to construct efficient solutions for practical use in engineering domains remains in question. In this paper, we present an extension of CPPN-NEAT, in which nodes grow connections across a dynamic substrate, and illustrate this by creating efficient 2-D truss structures. Using four benchmark problems, we then demonstrate that our extended CPPN-NEAT model outperforms similar HyperNEAT methods for approximating specific connectivity patterns, and suggests important clues regarding how to best harness generative and developmental representations to build scalable and high-performance physical morphologies.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | ALIFE 14 |
Subtitle of host publication | The Fourteenth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems |
Publisher | The MIT Press |
Pages | 255-262 |
Number of pages | 8 |
ISBN (Print) | 9780262326216 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jul 2014 |