The tree of life forms a concise snapshot of the history, and linkages between, all life forms on Earth. Another way to look at this diagram is to imagine what the world would have been like if history had played out differently.
If the evolutionary game was run again, how would the same fundamental building blocks have combined, given different selective pressures and exogenous shocks?
This research question exists at the intersection of evolutionary biology, engineering, and design, and over the last few years I have begun to ponder the question when set in the context of robotics. We (my research group and colleagues from around the world) are seeking to answer this question with the aim of challenging existing notions of what robots are, how they are designed, built, and controlled, and how they interact with their environment.
We ran a workshop on this topic at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) conference in Yokohama called “(Re) Designing the Tree of Robotic Life: A game of alternative timelines”, and as a follow-up we’re now inviting papers on this topic for a special issue. Papers submitted to this collection will explore scenarios in which the shifting tides of evolutionary history have resulted in a new (robotic) tree of life, and their goal should be to come up with radically new robot concepts suited to this reality.
Open questions in this thought-space include:
How might robotics have developed under different evolutionary paradigms?
What is a robot?
How are robots built and controlled, and how do they interact with their environments? How could they be different? Could they be better?
Can we better define the “Phylogenetic Tree of Robotic Life” as it is currently, and also consider its previously unimagined, “could-have-been” (or, perhaps, “yet-to-be”) branches?
Can the history of biological evolution inform future engineering design?
How can engineering design be augmented with elements of unconstrained, artistic freedom?