Exposing an evolutionary algorithm that is used to evolve robot controllers to variable conditions is necessary to obtain solutions which are robust and can cross the reality gap. However, we do not yet have methods f...
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Exposing an evolutionary algorithm that is used to evolve robot controllers to variable conditions is necessary to obtain solutions which are robust and can cross the reality gap. However, we do not yet have methods for analyzing and understanding the impact of the varying morphological conditions which impact the evolutionary process, and therefore for choosing suitable variation ranges. By morphological conditions, we refer to the starting state of the robot, and to variations in its sensor readings during operation due to noise. In this paper, we introduce a method that permits us to measure the impact of these morphological variations and we analyze the relation between the amplitude of variations, the modality with which they are introduced, and the performance and robustness of evolving agents. Our results demonstrate that (i) the evolutionary algorithm can tolerate morphological variations which have a very high impact, (ii) variations affecting the actions of the agent are tolerated much better than variations affecting the initial state of the agent or of the environment, and (iii) improving the accuracy of the fitness measure through multiple evaluations is not always useful. Moreover, our results show that morphological variations permit generating solutions which perform better both in varying and non-varying conditions.
This paper demonstrates a controller design of a multi-legged robotic swarm in a rough terrain environment. Many studies in swarm robotics are conducted with mobile robots that work in relatively flat fields. This pap...
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This paper demonstrates a controller design of a multi-legged robotic swarm in a rough terrain environment. Many studies in swarm robotics are conducted with mobile robots that work in relatively flat fields. This paper focuses on a multi-legged robotic swarm, which is expected to operate not only in a flat field but also in rough terrain environments. However, designing a robot controller becomes a challenging problem because a designer has to consider how to coordinate a large number of joints in a robot, besides the complexity of a swarm problem. This paper employed an evolutionary robotics approach for the automatic design of a robot controller. The experiments were conducted by computer simulations with the path formation task. The results showed that the proposed approach succeeds in generating collective behavior in flat and rough terrain environments.
Collective decision-making enables multi-robot systems to act autonomously in real-world environments. Existing collective decision-making mechanisms suffer from the so-called speed versus accuracy trade-off or rely o...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9798400704949
Collective decision-making enables multi-robot systems to act autonomously in real-world environments. Existing collective decision-making mechanisms suffer from the so-called speed versus accuracy trade-off or rely on high complexity, e.g., by including global communication. Recent work has shown that more efficient collective decision-making mechanisms based on artificial neural networks can be generated using methods from evolutionary computation. A major drawback of these decision-making neural networks is their limited interpretability. Analyzing evolved decision-making mechanisms can help us improve the efficiency of hand-coded decision-making mechanisms while maintaining a higher interpretability. In this paper, we analyze evolved collective decision-making mechanisms in detail and hand-code two new decision-making mechanisms based on the insights gained. In benchmark experiments, we show that the newly implemented collective decision-making mechanisms are more efficient than the state-of-the-art collective decision-making mechanisms voter model and majority rule.
Taking inspiration from the navigation ability of humans, this study investigated a method of providing robotic controllers with a basic sense of position. It incorporated robotic simulators into robotic controllers t...
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Taking inspiration from the navigation ability of humans, this study investigated a method of providing robotic controllers with a basic sense of position. It incorporated robotic simulators into robotic controllers to provide them with a mechanism to approximate the effects their actions had on the robot. Controllers with and without internal simulators were tested and compared. The proposed controller architecture was shown to outperform the regular controller architecture. However, the longer an internal simulator was executed, the more inaccurate it became. Thus, the performance of controllers with internal simulators reduced over time unless their internal simulator was periodically corrected.
In evolutionary robotics, Lexicase selection has proven effective when a single task is broken down into many individual parameterizations. Evolved individuals have generalized across unique configurations of an overa...
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In evolutionary robotics, Lexicase selection has proven effective when a single task is broken down into many individual parameterizations. Evolved individuals have generalized across unique configurations of an overarching task. Here, we investigate the ability of Lexicase selection to generalize across multiple tasks, with each task again broken down into many instances. There are three objectives: to determine the feasibility of introducing additional tasks to the existing platform;to investigate any consequential effects of introducing these additional tasks during evolutionary adaptation;and to explore whether the schedule of presentation of the additional tasks over evolutionary time affects the final outcome. To address these aims we use a quadruped animat controlled by a feed-forward neural network with joint-angle, bearing-to-target, and spontaneous sinusoidal inputs. Weights in this network are trained using evolution with Lexicase-based parent selection. Simultaneous adaptation in a wall crossing task (labelled wall-cross) is explored when one of two different alternative tasks is also present: turn-and-seek or cargo-carry. Each task is parameterized into 100 distinct variants, and these variants are used as environments for evaluation and selection with Lexicase. We use performance in a single-task wall-cross environment as a baseline against which to examine the multi-task configurations. In addition, the objective sampling strategy (the manner in which tasks are presented over evolutionary time) is varied, and so data for treatments implementing uniform sampling, even sampling, or degrees of generational sampling are also presented. The Lexicase mechanism successfully integrates evolution of both turn-and-seek and cargo-carry with wall-cross, though there is a performance penalty compared to single task evolution. The size of the penalty depends on the similarity of the tasks. Complementary tasks (wallcross/turn-and-seek) show better performance than a
This paper demonstrates to generate a collective behavior of a multi-legged robotic swarm based on the evolutionary robotics approach. Most studies in swarm robotics are conducted using mobile robots driven by wheels....
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This paper demonstrates to generate a collective behavior of a multi-legged robotic swarm based on the evolutionary robotics approach. Most studies in swarm robotics are conducted using mobile robots driven by wheels. This paper focuses on generating collective behavior using a multi-legged robotic swarm. The evolutionary robotics approach is employed for designing a robot controller. The intuition-based constraint factors are incorporated into the fitness function to make the gait of robots similar to natural organisms. The experiment on a task of forming a line is conducted in computer simulations using the PyBullet physics engine. The robot controller is represented by a recurrent neural network with a single hidden layer. The experimental results show that proposed constraint factors successfully designed the robot's gait similar to natural organisms. The results also show that the evolutionary robotics approach successfully designed the robot controller for collective behavior of a multi-legged robotic swarm.
In evolutionary robotics, robot controllers are often evolved in simulation, as using the physical robot for fitness evaluation can take a prohibitively long time. Simulators provide a quick way to evaluate controller...
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In evolutionary robotics, robot controllers are often evolved in simulation, as using the physical robot for fitness evaluation can take a prohibitively long time. Simulators provide a quick way to evaluate controller fitness. A simulator is tasked with providing appropriate sensor information to the controller. If the robot has an on-board camera, an entire virtual visual environment is needed to simulate the camera's signal. In the past, these visual environments have been constructed by hand, requiring the use of hand-crafted models, textures and lighting, which is a tedious and time-consuming process. This paper proposes a deep neural network-based architecture for simulating visual environments. The neural networks are trained exclusively from images captured from the robot, creating a 3-dimensional visual environment without using hand-crafted models, textures or lighting. It does not rely on any external domain specific datasets, as all training data is captured in the physical environment. Robot controllers were evolved in simulation to discern between objects with different colours and shapes, and they successfully completed the same task in the real world.
We study the effects of injecting human-generated designs into the initial population of an evolutionary robotics experiment, where subsequent population of robots are optimised via a Genetic Algorithm and MAP-Elites....
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450392372
We study the effects of injecting human-generated designs into the initial population of an evolutionary robotics experiment, where subsequent population of robots are optimised via a Genetic Algorithm and MAP-Elites. First, human participants interact via a graphical front-end to explore a directly-parameterised legged robot design space and attempt to produce robots via a combination of intuition and trial-and-error that perform well in a range of environments. Environments are generated whose corresponding high-performance robot designs range from intuitive to complex and hard to grasp. Once the human designs have been collected, their impact on the evolutionary process is assessed by replacing a varying number of designs in the initial population with human designs and subsequently running the evolutionary algorithm. Our results suggest that a balance of random and hand-designed initial solutions provides the best performance for the problems considered, and that human designs are most valuable when the problem is intuitive. The influence of human design in an evolutionary algorithm is a highly understudied area, and the insights in this paper may be valuable to the area of AI-based design more generally.
Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to understand others' mental states (e.g., intentions). Studies on human ToM show that the way we understand others' mental states is very efficient, in the sense that obser...
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Theory of mind (ToM) is the ability to understand others' mental states (e.g., intentions). Studies on human ToM show that the way we understand others' mental states is very efficient, in the sense that observing only some portion of others' behaviors can lead to successful performance. Recently, ToM has gained interest in robotics to build robots that can engage in complex social interactions. Although it has been shown that robots can infer others' internal states, there has been limited focus on the data utilization of ToM mechanisms in robots. Here we show that robots can infer others' intentions based on limited information by selectively and flexibly using behavioral cues similar to humans. To test such data utilization, we impaired certain parts of an actor robot's behavioral information given to the observer, and compared the observer's performance under each impairment condition. We found that although the observer's performance was not perfect compared to when all information was available, it could infer the actor's mind to a degree if the goal-relevant information was intact. These results demonstrate that, similar to humans, robots can learn to infer others' mental states with limited information.
This research proposed augmenting evolutionary robotics controllers with their own robotic simulator. The motivation behind this idea is that the controller could use the simulator to approximate the effects of its ac...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781728183923
This research proposed augmenting evolutionary robotics controllers with their own robotic simulator. The motivation behind this idea is that the controller could use the simulator to approximate the effects of its actions. This would allow the controller to maintain an approximation of the robot's location and orientation. It was hypothesised that this information could enhance a controller's navigation ability. Both regular and augmented controllers were tested and compared on a task that required them to employ adaptive navigation strategies to efficiently solve the task. Augmented controllers were shown to perform better and possess superior behaviours in comparison to regular controllers.
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