Collective motion emerging from evolving swarm controllers in different environments using gradient following task

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2203.11585v1
• Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2022 10:08:50 GMT
• Title: Collective motion emerging from evolving swarm controllers in different environments using gradient following task
• Authors: Fuda van Diggelen (1), Jie Luo (1), Tugay Alperen Karag\"uzel (1), Nicolas Cambier, Eliseo Ferrante, A.E. Eiben
• Abstract summary: We consider a challenging task where robots with limited sensing and communication abilities must follow the gradient of an environmental feature. We use Differential Evolution to evolve a neural network controller for simulated Thymio II robots. Experiments confirm the feasibility of our approach, the evolved robot controllers induced swarm behaviour that solved the task.
• Score: 2.7402733069181
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Designing controllers for robot swarms is challenging, because human developers have typically no good understanding of the link between the details of a controller that governs individual robots and the swarm behaviour that is an indirect result of the interactions between swarm members and the environment. In this paper we investigate whether an evolutionary approach can mitigate this problem. We consider a very challenging task where robots with limited sensing and communication abilities must follow the gradient of an environmental feature and use Differential Evolution to evolve a neural network controller for simulated Thymio II robots. We conduct a systematic study to measure the robustness and scalability of the method by varying the size of the arena and number of robots in the swarm. The experiments confirm the feasibility of our approach, the evolved robot controllers induced swarm behaviour that solved the task. We found that solutions evolved under the harshest conditions (where the environmental clues were the weakest) were the most robust and that there is a sweet spot regarding the swarm size. Furthermore, we observed collective motion of the swarm, showcasing truly emergent behavior that was not represented in- and selected for during evolution.

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