Comparison of Selection Methods in On-line Distributed Evolutionary Robotics

Iñaki Fernández Pérez (1) , Amine Boumaza (1) , François Charpillet (1)

1 MAIA - Autonomous intelligent machine

In this paper, we study the impact of selection methods in the context of on-line on-board distributed evolutionary algorithms. We propose a variant of the mEDEA algorithm in which we add a selection operator, and we apply it in a taskdriven scenario. We evaluate four selection methods that induce different intensity of selection pressure in a multi-robot navigation with obstacle avoidance task and a collective foraging task. Experiments show that a small intensity of selection pressure is sufficient to rapidly obtain good performances on the tasks at hand. We introduce different measures to compare the selection methods, and show that the higher the selection pressure, the better the performances obtained, especially for the more challenging food foraging task.

Mots clés: Artificial Intelligence; Evolutionary Robotics; Multi-agent Systems; Neural Networks; Selection Methods

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Robotique [cs.RO]; Réseau de neurones [cs.NE]; Système multi-agents [cs.MA]

Iñaki Fernández Pérez, Amine Boumaza, François Charpillet. Comparison of Selection Methods in On-line Distributed Evolutionary Robotics. ALIFE 14: The fourteenth international conference on the synthesis and simulation of living systems, Jul 2014, New York, United States. ⟨10.7551/978-0-262-32621-6-ch046⟩. ⟨hal-01091119⟩