Symbiotic Technology - How to Breed Machines and Animals

Symbiotic technology can be defined as a technology that adapts to individual learning, group dynamics, and evolutionary changes in animal populations while managing them over possibly many generations. As an example, I will discuss a proposed project that studies the use of robots to manage fish swarm similar to the way dogs are used for shepherding. Just like those dogs were bred, the robots can be designed using evolutionary algorithms, where selection is achieved by means of both predefined fitness functions and interaction with human users. I will discuss in detail experiments on how the complexity of behavior can grow in symbiotic coevolution.