Crossing the reality gap in evolutionary robotics by promoting transferable controllers

The reality gap, that often makes controllers evolved in simulation inefficient once transferred onto the real system, remains a critical issue in Evolutionary Robotics (ER); it prevents ER application to real-world problems. We hypothesize that this gap mainly stems from a conflict between the efficiency of the solutions in simulation and their transferability from simulation to reality: best solutions in simulation often rely on bad simulated phenomena (e.g. the most dynamic ones). This hypothesis leads to a multi-objective formulation of ER in which two main objectives are optimized via a Pareto-based Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm: (1) the fitness and (2) the transferability. To evaluate this second objective, a simulation-to-reality disparity value is approximated for each controller. The proposed method is applied to the evolution of walking controllers for a real 8-DOF quadrupedal robot. It successfully finds efficient and well-transferable controllers with only a fe...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: GECCO
• Authors: Sylvain Koos, Jean-Baptiste Mouret, Stéphane Doncieux
• Keywords: ER Application, GECCO 2010, Optimization, Reality Gap, Simulation