论文标题
环境引起的集体行为的出现在不断发展的群体中有限
Environment induced emergence of collective behaviour in evolving swarms with limited sensing
论文作者
论文摘要
为机器人群设计控制器是具有挑战性的,因为人类开发人员通常对控制单个机器人的细节和群体行为的群体的细节之间的联系没有很好的了解,这是群体成员与环境之间相互作用的间接结果。在本文中,我们研究了进化方法是否可以减轻此问题。我们考虑一项非常具有挑战性的任务,具有有限的感应和沟通能力的机器人必须遵循环境特征的梯度,并使用差分进化来进化用于模拟机器人的神经网络控制器。我们通过改变竞技场的大小和群中的机器人数来进行系统研究,以测量该方法的柔韧性和可伸缩性。实验证实了我们方法的可行性,即演变的机器人控制器引起了解决任务的群体行为。我们发现,在最恶劣的条件下(环境线索最弱的情况)进化的解决方案是最灵活的,并且关于群的大小有一个甜蜜的位置。此外,我们观察到了群体的集体运动,展示了在进化过程中未代表和选择的真正新兴行为。
Designing controllers for robot swarms is challenging, because human developers have typically no good understanding of the link between the details of a controller that governs individual robots and the swarm behavior that is an indirect result of the interactions between swarm members and the environment. In this paper we investigate whether an evolutionary approach can mitigate this problem. We consider a very challenging task where robots with limited sensing and communication abilities must follow the gradient of an environmental feature and use Differential Evolution to evolve a neural network controller for simulated robots. We conduct a systematic study to measure the flexibility and scalability of the method by varying the size of the arena and number of robots in the swarm. The experiments confirm the feasibility of our approach, the evolved robot controllers induced swarm behavior that solved the task. We found that solutions evolved under the harshest conditions (where the environmental clues were the weakest) were the most flexible and that there is a sweet spot regarding the swarm size. Furthermore, we observed collective motion of the swarm, showcasing truly emergent behavior that was not represented in- and selected for during evolution.