CSR:Small: TEAMS -- Transplanting Artificial Life Behaviors to Mobile Robots

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。TEAMS项目将数字进化应用于为协作机器人群体设计健壮的通信服务。示例应用包括用于救灾行动的机器人团队，在危险职业中协助人类，以及监控关键基础设施和公共服务设施（如饮用水水库）。在数字进化中，一群自我复制的计算机程序存在于用户定义的计算环境中，并受到突变和自然选择的影响。进化的算法（包含数字生物体基因组的指令序列）可以被重新编译，直接在硬件平台上执行。该项目探索了三种重叠的行为：节点的分布式自组织；容忍不利条件的集体通信操作；以及移动辅助通信方法，其中节点改变其位置以提高通信性能。进化的行为在一个由美国国家科学基金会赞助的数字进化试验台上进行评估，该试验台包含一个异构的微型机器人集合。观察数字生物进化过程的能力为研究复杂系统的驱动力提供了有力的方法。TEAMS项目利用这种开放式的探索方法，寻找更好的方法来构建移动机器人系统的软件，这些系统需要与物理世界相互作用，以便解决问题。在更广泛的范围内，该项目包括几个创新的教育和推广组成部分，例如一个课后项目，为经济困难的K-12学生提供令人兴奋的实践经验，包括进化计算、自适应软件和机器人技术。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).The TEAMS project applies digital evolution to the design of robust communication services for cooperating groups of robots. Example applications include teams of robots for disaster relief operations, assisting humans in dangerous occupations, and monitoring of critical infrastructure and public service facilities such as drinking water reservoirs. In digital evolution, a population of self-replicating computer programs exists in a user-defined computational environment and is subject to mutations and natural selection. Evolved algorithms (sequences of instructions comprising the genomes of digital organisms) can be recompiled to execute directly on hardware platforms. The project explores three overlapping classes of behavior: distributed self-organization of nodes; collective communication operations that tolerate adverse conditions; and mobility-aided communication methods, where nodes change their locations in order to improve communication performance. Evolved behaviors are evaluated on an NSF-sponsored digital evolution testbed containing a heterogeneous collection of microrobots. The ability to observe the evolutionary process in digital organisms provides a powerful method to investigate the driving forces in complex systems. The TEAMS project exploits this open-ended method of exploration to find better ways to construct software for mobile robotic systems that need to interact with the physical world, and each other, in order to solve problems. On a broader scale, the project includes several innovative educational and outreach components, such as an after-school program to provide economically disadvantaged K-12 students with exciting hands-on experiences involving evolutionary computation, adaptive software, and robotics.