The body of robots and their controllers need to be adapted to the task that they carry out. While it is possible to design and optimize free-form morphologies, its physical implementation consumes too many resources. In contrast, modular robots provide a feasible approach to design robotic morphologies that can be deployed in minutes, making them a suitable tool to implement virtual creatures. In this article, we tackle the main challenges to consider when evolving modular robots and mention some opportunities that these systems can provide.

Due to the replacement of natural flora and fauna with urban environments, a significant part of the earths organisms that function as primary consumers have been dispelled. To compensate for the reduction in the amount of primary consumers, robotic systems that mimic plant-like organisms are interesting to mimic for their potential functional and aesthetic value in urban environments. To investigate how to utilize plant developmental strategies in order to engender urban artificial plants, we built a simple evolutionary model that applies an L-System based grammar as an abstraction of plant development. In the presented experiments, phytomorphologies (plant morphologies) are iteratively constructed using a context sensitive L-System. The genomic representation of the L-System is subject to mutation by an evolutionary algorithm. These mutations thus alter the developmental rules of these phytomorphologies. We compare the differences between the light absorption of evolving virtual plants that remain static during their life and virtual plants that possess the possibility to move joints that link the separate parts of the virtual plants. Our results show that our evolutionary algorithm did not exploit potential beneficial joint actuation, instead, mostly static structures evolved. The results of our evolving L-System show that it is able to create various phytomorphologies, albeit that the results are preliminary and will be more thoroughly investigated in the future.