Abstract
The potential of cooperative coevolutionary algorithms (CCEAs) as a tool for evolving control for heterogeneous multirobot teams has been shown in several previous works. The vast majority of these works have, however, been confined to simulation-based experiments. In this paper, we present one of the first demonstrations of a real multirobot system, operating outside laboratory conditions, with controllers synthesised by CCEAs. We evolve control for an aquatic multirobot system that has to perform a cooperative predator-prey pursuit task. The evolved controllers are transferred to real hardware, and their performance is assessed in a non-controlled outdoor environment. Two approaches are used to evolve control: a standard fitness-driven CCEA, and novelty-driven coevolution. We find that both approaches are able to evolve teams that transfer successfully to the real robots. Novelty-driven coevolution is able to evolve a broad range of successful team behaviours, which we test on the real multirobot system.
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Notes
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Videos and logs of the experiments: http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.49582.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by centre grant (to BioISI, Centre Reference: UID/MULTI/04046/2013), from FCT/MCTES/PIDDAC, Portugal, and by grants SFRH/BD/89095/2012 and UID/EEA/50008/2013.
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Gomes, J., Duarte, M., Mariano, P., Christensen, A.L. (2016). Cooperative Coevolution of Control for a Real Multirobot System. In: Handl, J., Hart, E., Lewis, P., López-Ibáñez, M., Ochoa, G., Paechter, B. (eds) Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XIV. PPSN 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9921. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45823-6_55
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