Totipotent neural controllers for modular soft robots: Achieving specialization in body–brain co-evolution through Hebbian learning

Multi-cellular organisms typically originate from a single cell, the zygote, that then develops into a multitude of structurally and functionally specialized cells. The potential of generating all the specialized cells that make up an organism is referred to as cellular “totipotency”, a concept introduced by the German plant physiologist Haberlandt in the early 1900s. In an attempt to reproduce this mechanism in synthetic organisms, we present a model based on a kind of modular robot called Voxel-based Soft Robot (VSR), where both the body, i.e., the arrangement of voxels, and the brain, i.e., the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) controlling each module, are subject to an evolutionary process aimed at optimizing the locomotion capabilities of the robot. In an analogy between totipotent cells and totipotent ANN-controlled modules, we then include in our model an additional level of adaptation provided by Hebbian learning, which allows the ANNs to adapt their weights during the execution of the locomotion task. Our in silico experiments reveal two main findings. Firstly, we confirm the common intuition that Hebbian plasticity effectively allows better performance and adaptation. Secondly and more importantly, we verify for the first time that the performance improvements yielded by plasticity are in essence due to a form of specialization at the level of single modules (and their associated ANNs): thanks to plasticity, modules specialize to react in different ways to the same set of stimuli, i.e., they become functionally and behaviorally different even though their ANNs are initialized in the same way. This mechanism, which can be seen as a form of totipotency at the level of ANNs, can have, in our view, profound implications in various areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and applications thereof, such as modular robotics and multi-agent systems.