Competitive Co-evolution of Predator and Prey Sensory-Motor Systems

A recent trend in evolutionary robotics research is to maximize self-organization in the design of robotic systems in order to reduce the human designer bias. This article presents simulation experiments that extend Nolfi and Floreano's work on competitive co-evolution of neural robot controllers in a predator-prey scenario and integrate it with ideas from work on the 'coevolution' of robot morphology and control systems. The aim of the twenty-one experiments summarized here has been to systematically investigate the tradeoffs and interdependencies between morphological parameters and behavioral strategies through a series of predator-prey experiments in which increasingly many aspects are subject to self-organization through competitive co-evolution. The results illustrate that competitive co-evolution has great potential as a method for the automatic design of robotic systems.

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