Evolutionary robotics methods are particularly useful for engineering machines that must operate in environments in which humans have limited intuition (nanoscale, space, etc.).
Evolved simulated robots can also be used as scientific tools to generate new hypotheses in biology and cognitive science, and to test old hypothesis that require experiments that have proven difficult or impossible to carry out in reality.
[2] Adrian Thompson, Nick Jakobi, Dave Cliff, Inman Harvey, and Phil Husbands evolved controllers for a Gantry robot at the University of Sussex.
The first simulations of evolved robots were reported by Karl Sims and Jeffrey Ventrella of the MIT Media Lab, also in the early 1990s.
The first evolved robots to be built in reality were 3D-printed by Hod Lipson and Jordan Pollack at Brandeis University at the turn of the 21st century.