Engineering the Evolution of Self-Organising Behaviours in Swarm Robotics: A Case Study

Evolutionary Robotics (ER) is a powerful approach for the automatic synthesis of robot controllers, as it requires little a priori knowledge about the problem to be solved in order to obtain good solutions. This is particularly true for collective and swarm robotics, in which the desired behaviour of the group is an indirect result of the control and communication rules followed by each individual. However, the experimenter must make several arbitrary choices in setting up the evolutionary process, in order to define the correct selective pressures that can lead to the desired results. In some cases, only a deep understanding of the obtained results can point to the critical aspects that constrain the system, which can be later modified in order to re-engineer the evolutionary process towards better solutions. In this paper, we discuss the problem of engineering the evolutionary machinery that can lead to the desired result in the swarm robotics context. We also present a case study about self-organising synchronisation in a swarm of robots, in which some arbitrarily chosen properties of the communication system hinder the scalability of the behaviour to large groups. We show that by modifying the communication system, artificial evolution can synthesise behaviours that properly scale with the group size.

Tipo Pubblicazione: 
Articolo
Author or Creator: 
Trianni, Vito
Nolfi, Stefano
Publisher: 
MIT Press,, Cambridge, MA , Stati Uniti d'America
Source: 
Artificial life 17 (2011): 183–202. doi:10.1162/artl_a_00031
info:cnr-pdr/source/autori:Trianni, Vito ; Nolfi, Stefano/titolo:Engineering the Evolution of Self-Organising Behaviours in Swarm Robotics: A Case Study/doi:10.1162/artl_a_00031/rivista:Artificial life/anno:2011/pagina_da:183/pagina_a:202/intervallo_pagi
Date: 
2011
Resource Identifier: 
http://www.cnr.it/prodotto/i/200559
https://dx.doi.org/10.1162/artl_a_00031
info:doi:10.1162/artl_a_00031
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/artl_a_00031
Language: 
Eng
ISTC Author: 
Ritratto di Vito Trianni
Real name: 
Ritratto di Stefano Nolfi
Real name: