34 documents found, page 1 of 4
Supervised morphogenesis: exploiting morphological flexibility of self-assembli...
Mathews, N.; Christensen, A. L.; Stranieri, A.; Scheidler, A.; Dorigo, M.Self-assembling robots have the potential to undergo autonomous morphological adaptation. However, due to the simplicity in their hardware makeup and their limited perspective of the environment, self-assembling robots are often not able to reach their potential and adapt their morphologies to tasks or environments without external cues or prior information. In this paper, we present supervised morphogenesis — ...
Evolving flocking in embodied agents based on local and global application of R...
Ramos, R. P:; Oliveira, S. M.; Vieira, S. M.; Christensen, A. L.In large scale systems of embodied agents, such as robot swarms, the ability to flock is essential in many tasks. However, the conditions necessary to artificially evolve self-organised flocking behaviours remain unknown. In this paper, we study and demonstrate how evolutionary techniques can be used to synthesise flocking behaviours, in particular, how fitness functions should be designed to evolve high-perfor...
An approach to evolve and exploit repertoires of general robot behaviours
Gomes, J.; Oliveira, S. M.; Christensen, A. L.Recent works in evolutionary robotics have shown the viability of evolution driven by behavioural novelty and diversity. These evolutionary approaches have been successfully used to generate repertoires of diverse and high-quality behaviours, instead of driving evolution towards a single, task-specific solution. Having repertoires of behaviours can enable new forms of robotic control, in which high-level contro...
Mergeable nervous systems for robots
Mathews, N.; Christensen, A. L.; O’Grady, R.; Mondada, F.; Dorigo, M.Robots have the potential to display a higher degree of lifetime morphological adaptation than natural organisms. By adopting a modular approach, robots with different capabilities, shapes, and sizes could, in theory, construct and reconfigure themselves as required. However, current modular robots have only been able to display a limited range of hardwired behaviors because they rely solely on distributed cont...
Novelty-driven cooperative coevolution
Gomes, J.; Mariano, P.; Christensen, A. L.Cooperative coevolutionary algorithms (CCEAs) rely on multiple coevolving populations for the evolution of solutions composed of coadapted components. CCEAs enable, for instance, the evolution of cooperative multiagent systems composed of heterogeneous agents, where each agent is modelled as a component of the solution. Previous works have, however, shown that CCEAs are biased toward stability: the evolutionary...
Generic, scalable and decentralized fault detection for robot swarms
Tarapore, D.; Christensen, A. L.; Timmis, J.Robot swarms are large-scale multirobot systems with decentralized control which means that each robot acts based only on local perception and on local coordination with neighboring robots. The decentralized approach to control confers number of potential benefits. In particular, inherent scalability and robustness are often highlighted as key distinguishing features of robot swarms compared with systems that r...
Evolutionary online behaviour learning and adaptation in real robots
Silva, F.; Correia, L.; Christensen, A. L.Online evolution of behavioural control on real robots is an open-ended approach to autonomous learning and adaptation: robots have the potential to automatically learn new tasks and to adapt to changes in environmental conditions, or to failures in sensors and/or actuators. However, studies have so far almost exclusively been carried out in simulation because evolution in real hardware has required several day...
Evolving controllers for robots with multimodal locomotion
Ramos, R.; Duarte, M.; Oliveira, S. M.; Christensen, A. L.Animals have inspired numerous studies on robot locomotion, but the problem of how autonomous robots can learn to take advantage of multimodal locomotion remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we study how a robot with two different means of locomotion can effective learn when to use each one based only on the limited information it can obtain through its onboard sensors. We conduct a series of simulation-b...
Online hyper-evolution of controllers in multirobot systems
Silva, F.; Correia, L.; Christensen, A. L.In this paper, we introduce online hyper-evolution (OHE) to accelerate and increase the performance of online evolution of robotic controllers. Robots executing OHE use the different sources of feedback information traditionally associated with controller evaluation to find effective evolutionary algorithms and controllers online during task execution. We present two approaches: OHE-fitness, which uses the fitn...
OpenSwarm: An event-driven embedded operating system for miniature robots
Trenkwalder, S. M.; Lopes, Y. K.; Kolling, A.; Christensen, A. L.; Prodan, R; Gross, R.This paper presents OpenSwarm, a lightweight easy-to-use open-source operating system. To our knowledge, it is the first operating system designed for and deployed on miniature robots. OpenSwarm operates directly on a robot's microcontroller. It has a memory footprint of 1 kB RAM and 12 kB ROM. OpenSwarm enables a robot to execute multiple processes simultaneously. It provides a hybrid kernel that natively supp...