Researcher in Embodied Intelligence: AI and Machine Learning applied to Robotics

Leni K. Le Goff is currently holding a position at Edinburgh Napier University as Lecturer in AI and Machine Learning.

During LKL’s academic career, I had the opportunity to work in several projects in the fields of Developmental Robotics and Evolutionary Robotics, two complementary fields studying embodied intelligence.

My Ph.D. was funded by an EU-funded project DREAM (2015-2018). For this project, LKL studied the autonomous grounding of a robot’s perception of its surroundings through manipulation and image processing. LKL developed a novel classifier called collaborative mixture models able to handle uncertainty, to learn on a stream of data, and with a low number of samples.

Then, LKL obtained a position in the field of Evolutionary Robotics as a Research Fellow in the EPSRC-funded ARE project (2019-2022). The project was about generative design of robots and the challenging task of learning controllers for robots with unknown designs. He developed a new sample-efficient machine learning algorithm based on evolutionary strategies and probabilistic distribution estimation, called NIP-ES and integrated it into an efficient algorithm to generate diverse robot designs for a target task, called MELAI. Moreover, He developed and still maintains the open-source framework of the ARE project.

Since 2023, LKL has been a Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University and continues his research on evolutionary robotics, focusing on the autonomous generation of design for robotics. In 2025, he published a new algorithm MEHK combining the intrinsically motivated process Homeokinesis and his Asynchronous Morpho-Evolution algorithm.