Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Robotics
Home | Links | Bibliography
In the majority of evolutionary robotics work only the control programs are created
and configure by the evolutionary process. These controllers come in a variety of forms
including neural networks, genetic programming structures (koza-ecal-1992), fuzzy
logic controllers (hoffmann-ipmu-1996) and simple look-up and parameter tables that
relate sensor inputs to motor outputs (augustsson-gecco-2002). There have also been
several examples of evolvable hardware circuits being evolved for robot control ().
Neural networks are by far the most common type of controllers used in evolutionary
robotics. These can be encoded for the process of evolution in a variety of ways. For
instance, a neural controller can be represented as a set of connection weights. In this
case it is the weights of the network that are actually evolved. The majority of neural
networks used in evolutionary robotics are small and accommodate less than 10 sensor
inputs (nolfi-iwal-1994, quinn-iwbir-2002). These networks usually have less than ten
neurons and between ten and fifty weighted connections. In such cases just the set of
weight represented by ten to fifty numbers would be evolved. The largest networks in
ER have about 150 inputs and about 5000 connections (nelson-kimas-2003). For these
large networks the set of weights and neuron configuration are evolved in the form of a
variable sized matrix of numbers.
Not only controllers can be evolved. It is also possible to find a way to encode the
physical structure of a robot and evolve that also. Although there were attempts to do
this in the early years of ER research, it has only be in the past five or six years that
such methods have lead to robots able to function in the real world. These recent results
were accomplished by formulating a set of modular building units that could be easily
simulated and fabricated, but that could also be configured and combined into an
almost infinite variety of non-trivial robot bodies (lipson-n-2000, hornby-icra-2001,
macinnes-al-2004).
The robots and their controllers can be evolved in a variety of ways. Early work
dating from the 1990’s generally employed either embodied evolution or evolution in
simulation with transfer to real robots after the evolutionary process was complete.
More recent research has made use of more complex methods that may use simulation
for a potion of the evolution and real robots for another phase of the evolution. In
addition, work done in the last five years has co-evolved controllers and morphologies
in simulation in a way that allowed physical robots to be fabricated after evolution.
Embodied Evolution
In the case of embodied evolution, physical robots are used during the evolutionary
process (nolfi-iwal-1994, mondada-jras-1995, watson-cec-1999). In the simplest cases
controllers are loaded into robots, the robots are tested, and the associated controllers’
fitnesses are evaluated based on the performance of the real robots. Although this
procedure insures that the controllers can function in real robots (as opposed to
simulated ones), the process is slow –real time. An additional and more serious
problem is that even the worst controllers cannot be allowed to damage the real robots
during testing, because this would put a stop to the evolutionary process, at least until
the robots could be repaired or new ones built. What this really means is that embodied
evolution can’t make use of fitness measures that measure the true survivability of
robots. designers must instead decide what behaviors a robot is likely to need to
perform the task at hand without causing damaging to the robot. In order to do this, the
designers must have a reasonably good idea of how to perform the given task, and how
to constrain the robot’s training environment to that the robots won’t be damaged. This
is a problem when the goal is to get the robots to learn how to do something that the
designers don’t know how to do.
©2006A.L.Nelson