Body building: Hatching robot organisms

We propose a new scenario for the evolution of robot morphologies based on an egg metaphor. A swarm of robots is released in a large arena in which they form organisms through a process of morphogenesis. These organisms can reproduce by fertilising eggs in their vicinity, these fertilised eggs in turn build new organisms by recruiting free modules as a `seed'. We investigate the influence of three parameters of this evolutionary system: the time eggs wait to be fertilised, the maximum time a seed can use to recruit modules to form an organism and how long an organism lives. Specifically we investigate the influence of these parameters on the size and stability of the population of eggs, seeds and organisms. It is shown that the influence of the lifetime of an organism is the largest, and leads to many organisms, it should be set much higher than the other two. Furthermore setting the time an egg can be fertilised and the maximum time a seed is allowed to build an organism to the same value results in the most stable system regarding number of eggs and seeds. Finally setting the maximum seed time higher leads to to a slightly smaller population of bigger organisms.