Comprehensive Survey of Evolutionary Morphological Soft Robotic Systems

Evolutionary robotics aims to automatically design autonomous adaptive morphological robots that can evolve to accomplish a specific task while adapting to environmental changes. Soft robotics have demonstrated the feasibility of evolutionary robotics for the synthesis of robots control and morphology. The motivation of developing evolutionary soft computing techniques to that can generate task oriented structures for morphological robots makes the domain of soft robotics worthy of serious investigation and research, and hence this article summarizes an important volume of research for a computational and software architecture perspective. This paper reviews the literature and discusses various aspects of evolutionary robotics including the application on morphological soft robots to allow self assembly, self reconfiguration, self repair, and self reproduction. Then, major milestones are outlined along with important morphological soft robotic prototypes due to their importance in the field. Finally, the current state of the art in the field is assessed.