This is the corresponding repository for the submission "Learning Aquatic Locomotion with Animats" to the European Conference on Artificial Life, 2017. All of the included materials are subject to change depending on reviewer feedback, and rights are reserved to the authors until further notice following the paper acceptance decision.

Videos of the three morphologies can be found as follows:

• Worm
• Quadropus
• Stingray

MecaCell should be installed first in a different directory. The commit used in this work for the submission was 3435975, on the dev branch. MecaCell should be compiled following its instructions and the directory containing MecaCell should then be referenced in CMakeLists.txt, line 7:

set(MecaCellDir ~/MecaCell)

To compile the LALA source code, use CMake:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
cd ..

If this has properly compiled, you can run the results of the evolution presented in the paper:

./bin/console -f config/best_worm.json

You can also use the MecacellViewer to visualize the results:

./bin/viewer -f config/best_stingray.json

CMA-ES is provided using julia. To run the evolution, you must first create a shape_defaults.json file containing the defaults for the desired morphology. CMA-ES is then launched as follows:

cp config/worm_defaults.json config/shape_defaults.json
julia runcmaes.jl 1234