Researchers at the University of Fèdèrale de Lausanne, in Switzerland have made the first robot (physical and virtual) that evolves.

The Robots possess evolvable "genomes", researchers have identified key factors that may play important roles in determining the manner in which communication arises during the evolution of social organisms.

The researchers, Dario Floreano of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and Laurent Keller of the University of Lausanne, published their findings in the journal Current Biology yesterday.

Communication is critical for social organisms to ensure their ecological success, but the evolution of communication is very challenging to study because of the difficulty of performing experimental evolution with social animals, and the lack of fossil evidence for changes in communication skills over time.

The researchers first evolved colonies of virtual robots and the tested different strategies on real robots. Both simulated and real robots were set loose in an arena containing two types of objects, one classified as food, the other as poison. Both objects lit up red.

"They start with completely random behaviour," Keller explains. "All they can do is discriminate food from poison." The robots can see both food or poison from a distance of several metres but can only tell them apart when almost touching.

They then did some unnatural selection, they combined the genomes of the bots that found food and avoided poison most efficient. Their "genomes" where then combined and randomised in a way to mimic natural mating and mutation, this created the next generation of robots.

Among the findings was the observation that communication evolves rapidly when colonies contain genetically similar individuals, or when evolutionary selection pressure works primarily on the "group" level. The only scenario in which communication did not result in higher foraging efficiency was when colonies were composed of robots of low relatedness, and in which selection was strongest at the level of the individual.

Actually in some cases, these conditions gave rise to the use of deceptive communication signals, the robots became individualists and tricked other robots the eat poison to get all the food for themselves, this naturally decreased the colony performance, this behaviour is often seen in humans as well.

The researchers also found that once a system of communication became established during the evolution experiments, it tended to constrain the development of more efficient communication systems.

At the conclusion of the study, the researchers showed that they could implement "evolved" robot genomes in real robots, and that these robots did indeed display the communication and foraging behavior observed in the simulations.