Evolution of Complex Niche-Constructing Behaviors and Ecological Inheritance of Adaptive Structures in a Physically Grounded Environment

Niche construction is a process in which organisms modify the selection pressures on themselves and others through their ecological activities, and ecological inheritance is the consequence of niche construction inherited through generations. However, it is still unclear how such mutual interactions between robots or embodied agents and their physical environments can yield complex and divergent evolutionary processes or an open-ended evolution. Our purpose is to clarify what kind of complex and various niche-constructing behaviors evolve in a physically grounded environment under various conditions of ecological inheritance of constructed structures and spatial relationships. We focus on a predator-prey relationship, and constructed an evolutionary model in which a prey creature has to avoid predation through the construction of a structure composed of objects in a 2D physically simulated environment supported by a physics engine. We used a deep auto-encoder to extract the defining feature of adaptive structures automatically. The results in the case of no ecological inheritance revealed that the number of available resources can affect the diversity of emerging adaptive structures. Also, in the case with ecological inheritance, it was found that combinations of two types of ecological inheritance, which are the inheritance of adaptive structures and birthplace, can have strong effects on the diversity of emerging structures and the adaptivity of the population. We expect that findings in evolutionary simulations of niche-constructing behavior might contribute to evolutionary design of robotic builders or robot fabrication, especially when we assume physically simulated environments.