Embodied evolution is a methodology for evolutionary robotics that mimics the distributed, asynchronous, and autonomous properties of biological evolution. The evaluation, selection, and reproduction are carried out by cooperation and competition of the robots, without any need for human intervention. An embodied evolution framework is therefore well suited to study the adaptive learning mechanisms for artificial agents that share the same fundamental constraints as biological agents: self-preservation and self-reproduction. The main goal of the research in this thesis has been to develop a framework for performing embodied evolution with a limited number of robots, by utilizing time-sharing of subpopulations of virtual agents inside each robot. The framework integrates reproduction as a directed autonomous behavior, and allows for learning of basic behaviors for survival by reinforcement learning. The purpose of the evolution is to evolve the learning ability of the agents, by optimizing meta-properties in reinforcement learning, such as the selection of basic behaviors, meta-parameters that modulate the efficiency of the learning, and additional and richer reward signals that guides the learning in the form of shaping rewards. The realization of the embodied evolution framework has been a cumulative research process in three steps: 1) investigation of the learning of a cooperative mating behavior for directed autonomous reproduction; 2) development of an embodied evolution framework, in which the selection of pre-learned basic behaviors and the optimization of battery recharging are evolved; and 3) development of an embodied evolution framework that includes meta-learning of basic reinforcement learning behaviors for survival, and in which the individuals are evaluated by an implicit and biologically inspired fitness function that promotes reproductive ability. The proposed embodied evolution methods have been validated in a simulation environment of the Cyber Rodent robot, a robotic platform developed for ...
Embodied Evolution of Learning Ability
2007-01-01
Hochschulschrift
Elektronische Ressource
Englisch
DDC: | 629 |
Innately adaptive robotics through embodied evolution
British Library Online Contents | 2006
|IEEE | 2019
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