Evolved Transistor Array Robot Controllers¶

This paper represents the first use of a field programmable transistor array (FPTA) to develop robot control circuits through direct evolution in analog hardware. The team successfully created controllers for a physical robot capable of executing multiple visually-guided tasks, including locating targets within complex settings. The system also evolved circuits for speech recognition, enabling voice-activated behavioral switching. A notable innovation was the coevolution of visual features alongside controllers, accomplishing simultaneous dimensionality reduction, feature extraction, and selection. The work demonstrates that intrinsic analog evolution remains a viable approach for producing sophisticated robot controllers.