Developmental process.

A “mother robot” (A) is used for the automatic assembly of candidate agents from active and passive modules. For the construction process, the robotic manipulator is equipped with a gripper and a glue supplier. Each agent is represented by the information stored in its genome (B). It contains one gene per module, and each gene contains information about the module types, construction parameters and motor control of the agent. A construction sequence encoded by one gene is shown in (C). First, the part of the robot which was encoded by the previous genes is rotated (C1 to C2). Second, the new module (here active) is picked from stock, rotated (C3), and eventually attached on top of the agent (C4).