Phil Husbands introduces the field of robotics, where it has come from, and where it might go in the future. Explaining the technology underlying robots and their capabilities today, he also considers both the ethical problems of robots with increasing intelligence, and the wider socio-political challenges they create.
This book constitutes the thorougly refereed and revised post-workshop proceedings of the First European Workshop on Evolutionary Robotics, EvoRobot '98, held in Paris, France in April 1998. The 15 revised full papers presented outline the state of the art in this new interdisciplinary area of research and development. The introductory paper gives a survey of the use of evolutionary computing techniques for the automatic design of adaptive robots.