Download Weekly Report 1 Colin Luther

Weekly Report 1
Colin Luther
For my final project, I plan to create a four- legged andan eight- legged robot to
find out which of the two can evolve to jump higher. The quadruped will be the robot
from assignments 5-10, and the octopod will be a variation of that robot, having extra
legs appended to each of its sides while still retaining its symmetry. I aim to find out
whether the octopod’s four extra legs will be beneficial or detrimental towards its
jumping performance when compared to the quadruped. On one hand, twice as many legs
means twice as much power, however, it also means twice as much leg weight and
double the amount neurons that need to evolve in order to maximize fitness.
To evaluate each robot’s fitness I will change which value is sent from Bullet
back to Python after each trial. Instead of returning the body’s final Z position, I will
return the maximum distance in the Y direction that was reached by any of the robot’s
body parts. I order to do this I will implement code that compares the Y positions of
every part of the robot’s body at each timestep to whatever the previous maximum was.
Also, I plan to increase the maximum motor impulse for all joint motors in order to make
the jumps more visually apparent. I will evolve 50 generations of each robot and test each
one in a 1000-timestep trial. Afterwards, I should be able to draw a conclusion to answer
my question by comparing the final fitness of each robot.
In addition, the octopod’s legs will be placed towards the corners of its body
rather than the center in order to increase the robot’s balance and to distinguish its form
from a four- legged robot. Since the octopod will have twice as many motors as the
quadruped, I will also need to alter the dimensions of its neuron matrix in Python. I shall
make sure to capture four screen shots of the experiment: two showing early generations
of each robot jumping, and two showing the final generations jumping, as well as a line
graph showing each robot’s fitness across the 50 generations.