This is a bizarre sort of study. What can you do with robots that you can't do much more cheaply inside a simulation, apart from eat up a whole bunch of research funding with an excuse to build tiny little robots?
The researchers then created virtual representations of
these robots on a computer so that they could observe the
robots' evolution over time.So there actually are benefits to using robots instead of doing a simulation. Simulations are usually faster and cheaper to create but robots give a more realistic result.