(Re) Designing the Tree of Robotic Life

The tree of life forms a concise snapshot of the history, and linkages between, all life forms on Earth. Another way to look at this diagram is to imagine what the world would have been like if history had played out differently. If the evolutionary game was run again, how would the same fundamental building blocks have combined, given different selective pressures and exogenous shocks?

This Research Topic is placed at the intersection of evolutionary biology, engineering, and design, and ponders the above question in the context of robotics. Our aim is to challenge existing notions of what robots are, how they are built and controlled, and how they interact with their environments. Papers submitted to this collection should explore scenarios in which the shifting tides of evolutionary history have resulted in a new (robotic) tree of life, and their goal should be to come up with radically new robot concepts suited to this reality.

This Research Topic aims to bring together experts across a variety of different fields within robotics (and further reaching) to encourage papers brainstorming new and exciting ideas of how robotics may have developed under different evolutionary paradigms. By challenging pre-existing notions of what robots are, how they are built and controlled, and how they interact with their environments, the Research Topic not only helps to better define the “Phylogenetic Tree of Robotic Life” as it is currently, but also to consider its previously unimagined, “could-have-been” (or, perhaps, “yet-to-be”) branches. In doing so, we are hopeful that this will breed new international collaborations and exciting new research paths which are unique and approach robotics from an alternative (and perhaps unusual) perspective.

This Research Topic is linked to the workshop "(RE) DESIGNING THE TREE OF ROBOTIC LIFE: A Game of Alternative Timelines" which took place at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) conference in Yokohama, Japan on Monday 13th May. We encourage contributions to the Research Topic from workshop attendees and external relevant contributors. Any paper which was first published as a conference proceedings, must be extended to include 30% original content to be considered.