The very beginning of it was the study called The Origin of Artificial Species published in 2005 by Jong-Hwan Kim, Kang-Hee Lee, and Yong-Duk Kim. Of course it refers to the well-known theory The Origin of Species that was written by Charles Darwin in 1859. The idea was to think in a different way  robots researchers had done before. Indeed they presumed that those researchers had been trying to implement some kind of humanoid capable of behaving like humans but they did not try to think about what it could be like to be a robot. They didn’t find the essence of artificial species.

The answer consists in genetic programming which I will try to explain in another post later. So they presented “a new concept of artificial chromosomes as the essence to define the personality of a robot and to pass on its traits to the next generation, like a genetic inheritance” which means that they had found a method that would provide a population of artificial robots from a few of those chromosomes. From this point, the population would be able to reproduce itself with an evolution of the genes of its members. This creatures were also meant to be intelligent, capable of feelings and of different behaviours.
This is exactly what they presented in their amazing study.

You may wonder how those creatures could be able to think or feel something, which is exactly what puzzled me. I just supposed that their “brain” was hidden somewhere in the code by which I mean some kind of logic that would let them “think” in a bounded area. In order to understand it, I will use the example of the artificial dog they created: Rity.

Well, I’ll finish it tomorrow !

More Information:

Detailed article from Creative New

WebSite of the Robot Intelligence Technology Lab