Evolutionary neurocontrollers for autonomous mobile robots

In this article we describe a methodology for evolving neurocontrollers of autonomous mobile robots without human intervention. The presentation, which spans from technological and methodological issues to several experimental results on evolution of physical mobile robots, covers both previous and recent work in the attempt to provide a uni ed picture within which the reader can compare the e ects of systematic variations on the experimental settings. After describing some key principles for building mobile robots and tools suitable for experiments in adaptive robotics, we give an overview of di erent approaches to evolutionary robotics and present our methodology. We start reviewing two basic experiments showing that di erent environments can shape very di erent behaviors and neural mechanisms under very similar selection criteria. We then address the issue of incremental evolution in two di erent experiments from the perspective of changing environments and robot morphologies. Fina...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 1998
• Where: NN
• Authors: Dario Floreano, Francesco Mondada
• Keywords: Autonomous Mobile Robots, Mobile Robots, Neural Networks, NN 1998, Physical Mobile Robots