Testing Emergent Bilateral Symmetry in Evolvable Robots with Vision

Bilateral symmetry is a prominent characteristic in the animal kingdom and is linked to evolutionary advantages such as cephalization. This study investigates whether integrating vision into modular evolvable robots influences bilateral symmetry development for a targeted locomotion task. Through simulation, we found that vision did not significantly increase our measure of symmetry in the robots, which predominantly evolved into ‘snake-like’ morphologies (with only one limb extending from the head). However, vision capability was observed to accelerate the convergence of the evolutionary process in some conditions. Our findings suggest that, while vision enhances evolutionary efficiency, it does not necessarily promote symmetrical morphology in modular robots. Further research directions are proposed to explore more complex environments and alternative symmetry measures.