Evolutionary Design Synthesis – From Sensors to Controllers
Yizhen Zhang, Alcherio Martinoli, Erik Antonsson
Collaborators: Jonathan Litt, Edmond Wong (NASA Glenn Center

Abstract. In this project, an automated engineering design synthesis methodology based on evolutionary methodology is being explored, with special interest on design and optimization of distributed embodied systems. Two case studies have been considered so far; the first one concerns the design of a collective sensory system for traffic monitoring purposes, while the second one deals with the development of neural-based robot controllers for turbine blades inspection. It has been shown that the evolutionary methodology is able to address the engineering design challenges present in the case studies as well as other complex design problems, and synthesize novel design solutions of good quality. Moreover, the fitness function can be formulated as an aggregation of fuzzy design preferences with different weights and trade-off strategies leading to an automatic generation of the complete Pareto-optimal frontier.. (full report)