# Embodied Evolution in Collective Robotics: A Review

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.08992 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.08992/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [LARM: Large Auto-Regressive Model for Long-Horizon Embodied Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17424/) (2024)
- [Meta-control of social learning strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10015/) (2021)
- [GenSwarm: Scalable Multi-Robot Code-Policy Generation and Deployment via Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23875/) (2025)
- [Artificial Collective Intelligence Engineering: a Survey of Concepts and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05147/) (2023)
- [What Robot do I Need? Fast Co-Adaptation of Morphology and Control using Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02371/) (2021)
- [Evolution of Rewards for Food and Motor Action by Simulating Birth and Death](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15016/) (2024)
- [Meta-brain Models: biologically-inspired cognitive agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11938/) (2021)
- [Synthetic Aperture Sensing for Occlusion Removal with Drone Swarms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14692/) (2022)
- [Show me what you want: Inverse reinforcement learning to automatically design robot swarms by demonstration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06864/) (2023)
- [Enactive Artificial Intelligence: Subverting Gender Norms in Robot-Human Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08741/) (2023)
- [Lifelong Evolution of Swarms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17763/) (2025)
- [PEPA: a Persistently Autonomous Embodied Agent with Personalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00117/) (2026)
- [Evolution of Fear and Social Rewards in Prey-Predator Relationship](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09992/) (2025)
- [Seven Sources of Physical AI Capability Formation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09627/) (2026)
- [Artificial Id: Drive and Persistent Alignment in Agentic AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11911/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper provides an overview of evolutionary robotics techniques applied to on-line distributed evolution for robot collectives -- namely, embodied evolution. It provides a definition of embodied evolution as well as a thorough description of the underlying concepts and mechanisms. The paper also presents a comprehensive summary of research published in the field since its inception (1999-2017), providing various perspectives to identify the major trends. In particular, we identify a shift from considering embodied evolution as a parallel search method within small robot collectives (fewer than 10 robots) to embodied evolution as an on-line distributed learning method for designing collective behaviours in swarm-like collectives. The paper concludes with a discussion of applications and open questions, providing a milestone for past and an inspiration for future research.