Topology and weight neuroevolution for social learning in robotic swarms
摘要
Social learning in robotic swarms enables robots to improve their behavior by exchanging or imitating the behavioral knowledge of their peers. This study focuses on embodied evolution, a form of social learning in which an evolutionary algorithm is distributed across a population of robots, allowing each robot to evolve its controllers onboard through local interactions. This study proposes a simple embodied evolution approach that enables robots to evolve both the topology and weights of their neural network controllers during operation. The proposed approach utilizes a topology and weight neuroevolution method that uses only mutations for genetic variation. The robot controllers are evolved using an embodied evolution framework in a two-target navigation task conducted in computer simulations. The experimental results in a simulated task environment demonstrate that the proposed approach exhibits better performance than conventional fixed-topology controllers.