Evolving Symbolic Controllers

Abstract. The idea of symbolic controllers tries to bridge the gap between the top-down manual design of the controller architecture, as advocated in Brooks’ subsumption architecture, and the bottom-up designerfree approach that is now standard within the Evolutionary Robotics community. The designer provides a set of elementary behavior, and evolution is given the goal of assembling them to solve complex tasks. Two experiments are presented, demonstrating the efficiency and showing the recursiveness of this approach. In particular, the sensitivity with respect to the proposed elementary behaviors, and the robustness w.r.t. generalization of the resulting controllers are studied in detail.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: EVOW
• Authors: Nicolas Godzik, Marc Schoenauer, Michèle Sebag
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Bottom-up Designerfree Approach, Elementary Behaviors, EVOW 2003, Top-down Manual Design