active: late 2003 to early 2004

Botworld

2D Evolutionary Robotics Simulation Tool

This was my undergraduate senior design project in computer engineering. Dr. Dan Ashlock in the math department at Iowa State was doing research on the evolution of simulated robots behaviors. His "symbots" were simple artificial creatures living on discrete 2D grids. They could evolve to improve their performance on competitive tasks, like painting the floor or predator/prey scenarios. His software lacked any kind of GUI or visualization tools; he was simply printing out data and plotting the results.

Our project was to plug Dr. Ashlock's code into a GUI/visualization tool. We used wxwidgets and OpenGL to accomplish this. The result was a program called Botworld, which allowed users to evolve or design robot controllers, battle them against each other, and visualize the results.

Downloads:

Painter bots competing
Painter bots competing
Final project poster
Final project poster