Effect of Fitness for the Evolution of Autonomous Robots in an Open-Environment

The choice of a fittness function in artificial evolution has strong consequences on the evolvability of robots, dynamics of the evolutionary process, and ultimately on the outcome of the evolutionary process. In this paper, the effect of fitness functions for the evolution of autonomous robots to navigate in an open-environment by avoiding obstacles is studied. It is found that both the number and description of components of a fitness function affect the convergence of the evolutionary process. However, the performance of evolved robots in an unknown environment is greatly dependent on the description of components of a fitness function.

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