1. TITLE Autonomous Evolution of Dynamic Gaits with Two Quadruped Robots 2. NAMES AND ADDRESSES Gregory S. Hornby Mailstop 269-3 QSS Group Inc. Intelligent Systems Division NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA 94107 1-650-604-3373 Seiichi Takamura Shinbashi Sumitomo Building 5-11-3 Shinbashi, Minato-ku, Tokyo, 105-0004 JAPAN Tel:+81 3 5777 7780 Fax:+81 3 5777 7902 Takashi Yamamoto Design Section No.2 Camera Products Development Image Sensing Products Division Broadband Communication Company Sony Corporation Professional Solution Network Company Gate City Osaki, West Tower 11F / Osaki East TEC. 1-11-1 Osaki Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo, 141-0032 JAPAN +81-3-5448-2111 Masahiro Fujita Sony Corporation 6-7-35 Kitashinagawa, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo, 141-0001, Japan JAPAN +81-3-5448-2111 3. CORRESPONDING AUTHOR Greg Hornby, hornby@email.arc.nasa.gov 4. A challenging task that must be accomplished for every legged robot is creating the walking and running behaviors needed for it to move. In this paper we describe our system for autonomously evolving dynamic gaits on two of Sony's quadruped robots. Our evolutionary algorithm runs on board the robot and uses the robot's sensors to compute the quality of a gait without assistance from the experimenter. First, we show the evolution of a pace and trot gait on the OPEN-R prototype robot. With the fastest gait, the robot moves at over 10 m/min, which is more than forty body-lengths/min. While these first gaits are somewhat sensitive to the robot and environment in which they are evolved, we then show the evolution of robust dynamic gaits, one of which is used on the ERS-110, the first consumer version of AIBO. 5. LIST OF CRITERIA Developing gaits for real, legged robots has been a challenge in the field of Robotics ever since the first legged robots were built. This entry is human-competitive under B and G. 6. STATEMENT of SATISFYING CRITERIA B. While static gaits can be hand-coded relatively easily, dynamic gaits have been a longstanding challenge and achieving any dynamic gait (whether bound, trot, pace or gallop) has generally been publishable in the field of Robotics regardless of the speed that has been achieved. G. That this problem is of longstanding difficulty in the field is demonstrated by DARPA's BAA 05-25 "Learning Locomotion" which was released this year and calls for proposals to develop gaits for a quadruped that move the robot at 0.1 leg-lengths/sec in Phase I and 0.6 leg-lengths/sec in Phase II. The evolutionary system presented for this entry produced dynamic gaits for two different quadruped robots and evolved that moved the robot at up to 1.2 leg-lengths/sec -- more than twice the requirements of DARPA's BAA. In addition, while the human engineers at Sony (two of which are co-authors on the paper) were unable to hand-create good dynamic gaits for either of these robots, one of the evolved gaits passed the tests of Sony's Quality Assurance division and is used on Sony's AIBO ERS 110, of which more than 10,000 units have been sold world-wide. 7. FULL CITATION OF PAPER Autonomous Evolution of Dynamic Gaits With Two Quadruped Robots Hornby, G.S. Takamura, S. Yamamoto, T. Fujita, M. This paper appears in: Robotics, IEEE Transactions on [see also Robotics and Automation, IEEE Transactions on] Publication Date: June 2005 Volume: 21 , Issue: 3 On page(s): 402 - 410 ISSN: 1552-3098 DOI: 10.1109/TRO.2004.839222 Posted online: 2005-05-31 08:32:19.0