Cooperative co-evolution of configuration and control for modular robots

Chourouk Guettas, Foudil Cherif, Thomas Breton, Yves Duthen
2014 2014 International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems (ICMCS)  
The general approach in modular robots is to hand design the morphology, and then optimizes the controller of the structure for a given task. Evolutionary robotics has proposed evolution as a bio-inspired approach to overcome the limitations of human intuition in designing robots; theoretically, the resulting structures will be better adapted. In this work, we propose an approach based on cooperative co-evolutionary genetic algorithms to design configurations and controllers for homogenous
more » ... s implicitly to support self-reconfiguration, The algorithm introduces some elements to make finding solutions easier and faster by co-evolving two populations; a population of motions sequence to search a sequence of movements that can rearrange a given modular configuration into a new one that suits a different task defined by its desired function and a population of homogenous fixed topology ANNs for the controllers to perform locomotion as a behavior evolved using genetic algorithm based on standard deviation norm. The modular robots are evaluated in a simulation environment implemented with NVidia physics engine; PhysX. The experiments carried out in this work show that co-evolving both the configuration and the controllers positively contributes to the robot's performance and optimizes its locomotion behavior.
doi:10.1109/icmcs.2014.6911138 fatcat:55ft4x4w45aixadq33cvawngbi