Learning to Move a Robot with Random Morphology

Complex robots inspired by biological systems usually consist of many dependent actuators and are difficult to control. If no model is available automatic learning and adaptation methods have to be applied. The aim of this contribution is twofold: (1) To present an easy to maintain and cheap test platform, which fulfils the requirements of a complex control problem. (2) To discuss the application of Genetic Programming for evolution of control programs in real time. An extensive number of experiments with two real robots has been carried out.

[1]  Karl Sims,et al.  Evolving 3D Morphology and Behavior by Competition , 1994, Artificial Life.

[2]  Ralf Salomon,et al.  Scaling Behavior of the Evolution Strategy when Evolving Neuronal Control Architectures for Autonomous Agents , 1997, Evolutionary Programming.

[3]  Peter Nordin,et al.  Genetic Programming Controlling a Miniature Robot , 1995 .

[4]  P Bourgine,et al.  Towards a Practice of Autonomous Systems , 1992 .

[5]  John R. Koza,et al.  Evolution of Subsumption Using Genetic Programming , 1993 .

[6]  Dave Cliff,et al.  Challenges in evolving controllers for physical robots , 1996, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[7]  Wolfgang Banzhaf,et al.  Genetic Programming: An Introduction , 1997 .

[8]  Vidroha Debroy,et al.  Genetic Programming , 1998, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[9]  M. Triantafyllou,et al.  An Efficient Swimming Machine , 1995 .

[10]  Joel W. Burdick,et al.  Gait kinematics for a serpentine robot , 1996, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[11]  Luc Steels,et al.  Emergent functionality in robotic agents through on-line evolution , 1994 .

[12]  Bernhard Klaassen,et al.  GMD-Snake: A Semi-Autonomous Snake-like Robot , 1996, DARS.

[13]  Yuval Davidor,et al.  Genetic algorithms and robotics , 1991 .

[14]  Tamio Arai,et al.  Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems 3 , 1998 .

[15]  Marco Dorigo,et al.  Genetics-based machine learning and behavior-based robotics: a new synthesis , 1993, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern..

[16]  Stefano Nolfi,et al.  How to Evolve Autonomous Robots: Different Approaches in Evolutionary Robotics , 1994 .