Engineering the Evolution of Self-Organizing Behaviors in Swarm Robotics: A Case Study
Engineering the Evolution of Self-Organizing Behaviors in Swarm Robotics: A Case Study
复制标题
群体机器人自组织行为进化的工程设计：案例研究
作者：
V. Trianni;S. Nolfi
进化机器人（ER）是自动合成机器人控制器的一种强大方法，因为它几乎不需要有关要解决的问题的先验知识即可获得良好的解决方案。对于集体机器人和群体机器人来说尤其如此，其中群体的期望行为是每个个体遵循的控制和通信规则的间接结果。然而，实验者在设置进化过程时必须做出一些任意选择，以便定义可以导致所需结果的正确选择压力。在某些情况下，只有对所获得的结果进行深入理解才能指出限制系统的关键方面，然后可以对其进行修改，以便重新设计进化过程以获得更好的解决方案。在本文中，我们讨论了设计进化机制的问题，该进化机制可以在群体机器人背景下实现预期的结果。我们还提出了一个关于机器人群中自组织同步的案例研究，其中通信系统的一些任意选择的属性阻碍了大群体行为的可扩展性。我们证明，通过修改通信系统，人工进化可以合成随群体规模适当扩展的行为。
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 behavior 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 article, 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-organizing synchronization in a swarm of robots, in which some arbitrarily chosen properties of the communication system hinder the scalability of the behavior to large groups. We show that by modifying the communication system, artificial evolution can synthesize behaviors that scale properly with the group size.