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
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