Evolving FPGA-based robot controllers using an evolutionary algorithm

In this paper, a novel evolutionary algorithm for intrinsic hardware evolution of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) controllers is presented. The main feature of the evolutionary algorithm consists of a mutation operator, in which the mutation rate is defined according to the fitness. Experimental results on a Kephera robot show that the algorithm proposed can successfully navigate the robot to avoid collision in an unknown/changing environment.

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