Using neuroevolution for designing soft medical devices

Soft robots can exhibit better performance in specific tasks compared to conventional robots, particularly in healthcare related tasks. However, the field of soft robotics is still young, and designing them often involves mimicking natural organisms or relying heavily on human experts’ creativity. A formal automated design process is required. The use of neuroevolution-based algorithms to automatically design initial sketches of soft actuators that can enable the movement of future medical devices, such as drug-delivering catheters, is proposed. The actuator morphologies discovered by algorithms like Age-Fitness Pareto Optimisation, NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT), and Hypercube-based NEAT (HyperNEAT) were compared based on the maximum displacement reached and their robustness against various control methods. Analysing the results granted the insight that neuroevolution-based algorithms produce better-performing and more robust actuators under diverse control methods. Specifically, the best-performing morphologies were discovered by the NEAT algorithm.