Embodied artificial evolution: Artificial evolutionary systems in the 21st Century

Evolution is one of the major omnipresent powers in the universe that has been studied for about two centuries. Recent scientific and technical developments make it possible to make the transition from passively understanding to actively using evolutionary processes. Today this is possible in Evolutionary Computing, where human experimenters can design and manipulate all components of evolutionary processes in digital spaces. We argue that in the near future it will be possible to implement artificial evolutionary processes outside such imaginary spaces and make them physically embodied. In other words, we envision the “Evolution of Things”, rather than just the evolution of digital objects, leading to a new field of Embodied Artificial Evolution (EAE). The main objective of this paper is to present a unifying vision in order to aid the development of this high potential research area. To this end, we introduce the notion of EAE, discuss a few examples and applications, and elaborate on the expected benefits as well as the grand challenges this developing field will have to address.