Generating Flying Creatures using Body-Brain Co-Evolution

Abstract

This paper describes a system that produces double-winged flying creatures using body-brain co-evolution without need of complex flapping flight aerodynamics. While artificial life techniques have been used to create a variety of virtual creatures, little work has explored flapping-winged creatures for the difficulty of genetic encoding problem of wings with limited geometric primitives as well as flapping-wing aerodynamics. Despite of the simplicity of system, our result shows aesthetical looking and organic flapping flight locomotions. The restricted list structure is used in genotype encoding for morphological symmetry of creatures and is more easily handled than other data structures. The creatures evolved by this system have two symmetric flapping wings consisting of continuous triangular patches and show various looking and locomotion such as wings of birds, butterflies and bats or even imaginary wings of a dragon and pterosaurs.