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Evolving Aggregation Behaviors in a Swarm of Robots
Vito Trianni
IRIDIA - Université Libre de Bruxelles
On 2003-09-10 at 15:00:00 (Brussels Time)

Abstract

In this talk, we present our study of aggregation in a swarm of simple robots, called "s-bots", having the capability to self-organize and self-assemble to form a robotic system, called a "swarm-bot". The aggregation process, observed in many biological systems, is of fundamental importance since it is the prerequisite for other forms of cooperation that involve self-organization and self-assembling. We consider the problem of defining the control system for the swarm-bot using artificial evolution. The results obtained in a simulated 3D environment are presented and analyzed. They show that artificial evolution, exploiting the complex interactions among s-bots and between s-bots and the environment, is able to produce simple but general solutions to the aggregation problem.

Keywords

Evolutionary Robotics, Self-Organization

References

  1. Trianni V., Gross R., Labella T.H., Sahin E., and Dorigo M.. (2003) Evolving Aggregation Behaviors in a Swarm of Robots. In W. Banzhaf and T. Christaller and P. Dittrich and J. T. Kim and J. Ziegler (ed.) Advances in Artificial Life - Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL). Springer Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg. In press.
    See http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~vtrianni/docs/ecal03.pdf