Towards accelerated distributed evolution for adaptive behaviours in swarm robotics

The major problem facing swarm robotics is that of design. A recent promising approach is the application of evolutionary algorithms to solve the problem of decomposing group behaviour to that of interacting individual behaviours. This paper presents work conducted so far towards implementing the necessary framework to distribute an evolutionary algorithm across a swarm of robots, augmented with an embedded simulator to provide rapid life-time behavioural adaptability to each robot. The principle has been demonstrated through the distributed evolution of obstacle avoidance behaviour on varying group sizes of physical robots This paper provides preliminary results that validate the principle of an embedded simulator incorporated with distributed evolution, and shows a positive correlation between an increase in robot group size and the rate of distributed evolution. Finally, this paper describes further points to investigate in the presented experiment scenario and potential directions for future research.

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