On the Origin of Environments by Means of Natural Selection

The field of adaptive robotics involves simulations and real-world implementations of robots that adapt to their environments. In this article, I introduce adaptive environmentics -- the flip side of adaptive robotics -- in which the environment adapts to the robot. To illustrate the approach, I offer three simple experiments in which a genetic algorithm is used to shape an environment for a simulated khepera robot. I then discuss at length the potential of adaptive environmentics, also delineating several possible avenues of future research.