Cooperative Behavior Acquisition in a Multiple Mobile Robot Environment by Co-evolution

Co-evolution has recently beeb receiving increased attention as a method for multi agent simultaneous learing. This paper discusses how multiple robots can emerge cooperative behaviours through co-evolutionary processes. As an example task, a simplified soccer game with three learning robots is selected and a GP (genetic programming) method is applied to individual population corresponging to each robot so as to obtain cooperative and competitive behavours through evolutionary processes. The complexity of the problem can be explained twofold: co-evolution for cooperative behaviors needs exact synchronization of mutual evolutions, and three robot co-evolution requires well-complicated environment setups that may gradually change from simpler to more complicated situations so that they can obtain cooperative and competitive behaviours simultaneously in a wide range of search area in various kinds of aspects. Simuation results are shown, and a discussion is given.