History
The foundation of ER was laid with work at the national research council in Rome in the 90s, but the initial idea of encoding a robot control system into a genome and have artificial evolution improve on it dates back to the late 80s.
In 1992 and 1993 two research groups, one surrounding Floreano and Mondada at the EPFL in Lausanne and the other involving Cliff, Harvey, and Husbands from COGS at the University of Sussex reported promising results from experiments on artificial evolution of autonomous robots. The success of this early research triggered a wave of activity in labs around the world trying to harness the potential of the approach.
Lately, the difficulty in "scaling up" the complexity of the robot tasks has shifted attention somewhat towards the theoretical end of the field rather than the engineering end.
Read more about this topic: Evolutionary Robotics
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)