Figure 1
Modeling development. An evolved soft robot changes its shape during its lifetime (postnatal development), from a walking quadruped into a rolling form. Evolution dictates how a robot’s morphology develops by setting each voxel’s initial \(({\ell }_{k})\) and final \(({\ell }_{k}^{\ast })\) resting length. The length of a single voxel k is plotted to illustrate its (slower) growth and (faster) actuation processes. Voxel color indicates the current length of that cell: the smallest voxels are blue, medium sized voxels are green, and the largest voxels are red. As robots develop and interact with a physically realistic environment, they generate heterogeneous behavior in terms of instantaneous velocity (bottom arrows). Soft robot evolution, development and physiological functioning can be seen in Supplementary Video S1.
