Three generations of automatically designed robots

The difficulties associated with designing, building, and controlling robot s have led their development to a stasis: Applications are limited mostly t o repetitive tasks with predefined behavior. Over the last few years we hav e been trying to address this challenge through an alternative approach: Ra ther than trying to control an existing machine or create a general-purpose robot, we propose that both the morphology and the controller should evolv e at the same time. This process can lead to the automatic design of specia l-purpose mechanisms and controllers for specific short-term objectives. He re we provide a brief review of three generations of our recent research, w hich underlies the robots shown on the cover of this issue: Automatically d esigned static structures, automatically designed and manufactured dynamic electromechanical systems, and modular robots automatically designed throug h a generative DNA-like encoding.