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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Guest editors' introduction: special issue on sensor evolution.

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Artificial life researchers, in their attempts to create life-as-it-could-be, have widely studied both the behavior of animals and artifacts. Early precursors of life-like artificial systems such as Grey Walter’s tortoises [4] or Valentino Braitenberg’s vehicles [1] were already demonstrating that ALife research is strongly motivated by the desire to understand and create life-like behavior and (neural) control. Creating life-like behavior in simulations or robots has increased our understanding of the design and evolution of controllers for artificial systems. Despite the interrelationship between behavior, sensors, and other morphological characteristics of animal systems, the evolution of sensors is rarely the primary aim of scientific investigations. The choice of sensors for robots is often limited by practical or financial constraints, and sensors in simulations are often modeled without strong reference to biological sensors. In natural evolution one finds impressive examples of the principle of exploiting new sensory channels and the information they carry. Olfactory, tactile, auditory and visual, but also electrical and even magnetic senses have evolved in a multitude of variants, often utilizing organs not originally “intended” for the purpose they serve at present. Many biological sensors reach a degree of structural and functional complexity and of efficiency that is envied by engineers creating man-made sensors. Sensors enable animals to survive in dynamic and unstructured environments, to perceive and react appropriately to features in the biotic and abiotic environment, including members of their own species as well as predators and prey. The goal of synthesizing artificial sensors for hardware or software systems suggests a similar approach to that taken for generating life-like behavior, namely, using evolutionary techniques to explore design spaces and generate sensors that are specifically adapted with respect to environmental and other fitness-related constraints. Recent advancements in simulation as well as hardware technology provide increasing means to study sensor evolution [3]. The topic of sensor evolution is becoming a very modern and promising direction of research situated between biology, robotics, and artificial life. Research in this direction strives to provide