Evolutionary Synthesis of Sensing Controllers for Voxel-based Soft Robots
Evolutionary Synthesis of Sensing Controllers for Voxel-based Soft Robots
复制标题
基于体素的软机器人传感控制器的进化综合
DOI：
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发表时间：
2019
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
A. D. Lorenzo
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Jacopo Talamini;Eric Medvet;Alberto Bartoli;A. D. Lorenzo
软机器人允许有趣的形态和行为设计，因为它们比由刚性部件组成的机器人表现出更多的自由度。特别是，基于体素的软机器人（VSRs）-弹性立方体积木的聚合体-吸引了机器人和人工生命研究人员的兴趣。VSR可以通过改变单个块的体积来控制：简单而有效的控制器，不利用环境的反馈，已经通过进化算法（EA）自动设计。在这项工作中，我们探讨了以人工神经网络的形式发展传感控制器的可能性：因此，我们允许机器人感知它移动的环境。虽然感知控制器的搜索空间比非感知控制器的搜索空间大，但我们证明了有效的感知控制器可以进化为实现有趣的运动行为。我们还通过实验研究了VSR形态对搜索有效性的影响，并验证了传感控制器确实能够利用其传感能力更好地解决运动任务。
Soft robots allow for interesting morphological and behavioral designs because they exhibit more degrees of freedom than robots composed of rigid parts. In particular, voxel-based soft robots (VSRs)—aggregations of elastic cubic building blocks—have attracted the interest of Robotics and Artificial Life researchers. VSRs can be controlled by changing the volume of individual blocks: simple, yet effective controllers that do not exploit the feedback of the environment, have been automatically designed by means of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs). In this work we explore the possibility of evolving sensing controllers in the form of artificial neural networks: we hence allow the robot to sense the environment in which it moves. Although the search space for a sensing controller is larger than its non-sensing counterpart, we show that effective sensing controllers can be evolved which realize interesting locomotion behaviors. We also experimentally investigate the impact of the VSR morphology on the effectiveness of the search and verify that the sensing controllers are indeed able to exploit their sensing ability for better solving the locomotion task.