The 40th anniversary of the ALIFE Conference 2025 conference series is approaching. Please contribute your memories and archival materials to help me prepare a book for this anniversary in the field of #ArtificialLife. #ALIFE40 ISAL Artificial Life #alife droplets.vscht.cz/links/alife40

We're excited to announce the first Evolving Self-organisation workshop at GECCO 2025! Submission deadline: March 26, 2025 More information: …-self-organisation-workshop.github.io

New preprint. Accelerated co-design of robots through morphological pretraining. With Sam Kriegman. We pretrained a universal controller in minutes through differentiable simulation. Then we used it as a prior for zero-shot and few-shot evolution to discover robots like this:

We found that morphological pretraining was able to unlock successful recombination ("crossover") of substructures across body designs.

A new #ScienceReview presents an overview of neuroevolution and explores how neuroevolution experiments can be used to gain insight into neuroscience questions. scim.ag/4aWVr2J

Today's evolutionary #robotics lecture: minimal cognition. youtu.be/B_rKZZe3KOI?fe…

Science fiction has long been full of robots that look like we do, but in the real world humanoid machines have been a nonstarter. That’s changing. on.wsj.com/4if2t5h

Material? Robot? It’s a metabot. "You can transform between a material and a robot, and it is controllable with an external magnetic field." — Glaucio Paulino, @eprinceton professor In an article published in nature, researchers describe how they drew inspiration from

Online this afternoon … a visionary project on the possibilities of alien life 👽led by Claire Isabel Webb , featuring planets imagined by Prof. Lee Cronin Sara Seager Sam Kriegman Estelle Janin and more

our new system trains humanoid robots using data from cell phone videos, enabling skills such as climbing stairs and sitting on chairs in a single policy (w/ Hongsuk Benjamin Choi Junyi Zhang David McAllister)

How the natural world is inspiring the robot eyes of the future nature.com/articles/d4158… EPFL

Tired of tuning PPO or blaming it on reward, task design, etc.? Introducing EPO -- our second (and hopefully final :) attempt at fixing PPO at scale! Contrary to intuition, as the batch size or data increases, PPO saturates due to a lack of diversity in sampling. We proposed a

My ICRA Keynote: “Robot Learning in Isolation” This keynote talk is about technical paths for systems that do not have communications and are operating in novel environments, building machine learning models from scratch as they go. youtube.com/watch?v=hcYrL8…

Professor Ryan Truby (Robotic Matter Lab) developed a soft artificial muscle, paving the way for untethered animal- and human-scale robots. The new actuators provide the performance and mechanical properties required for building robotic musculoskeletal systems. spr.ly/6018fr932

“This type of robot… is rarely seen in any applications. Unless the authors can show that this type of robot is widely use or will be widely used, the research in this paper is meaningless.” —Reviewer Xjm2, NeurIPS 2025

We’ve all seen humanoid robots doing backflips and dance routines for years. But if you ask them to climb a few stairs in the real world, they stumble! We took our robot on a walk around town to environments that it hadn’t seen before. Here’s how it works🧵⬇️