Frontiers in Evolutionary Robotics

Abstract

This book presented techniques and experimental results which have been pursued for the purpose of evolutionary robotics. Evolutionary robotics is a new method for the automatic creation of autonomous robots. When executing tasks by autonomous robots, we can make the robot learn what to do so as to complete the task from interactions with its environment, but not manually pre-program for all situations. Many researchers have been studying the techniques for evolutionary robotics by using Evolutionary Computation (EC), such as Genetic Algorithms (GA) or Genetic Programming (GP). Their goal is to clarify the applicability of the evolutionary approach to the real-robot learning, especially, in view of the adaptive robot behavior as well as the robustness to noisy and dynamic environments. For this purpose, authors in this book explain a variety of real robots in different fields. For instance, in a multi-robot system, several robots simultaneously work to achieve a common goal via interaction; their behaviors can only emerge as a result of evolution and interaction. How to learn such behaviors is a central issue of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI), which has recently attracted much attention. This book addresses the issue in the context of a multi-robot system, in which multiple robots are evolved using EC to solve a cooperative task. Since directly using EC to generate a program of complex behaviors is often very difficult, a number of extensions to basic EC are proposed in this book so as to solve these control problems of the robot.