Artificial evolution teaches robots to swarm in the wild
UK researchers have embedded swarm robots with processing power that enables in situ artificial evolution and independent learning.
Refining the behaviour of robot swarms in this way has previously required external computation, but this limits them to lab settings where those additional resources are located.
The new research, from the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England (UWE), internalises the computation required to evolve behaviour. This could lay the path for robot swarms to operate in real-world environments, learning on the fly as they perform industrial, agricultural and search & rescue tasks. The work is published in Advanced Intelligent Systems .
“This is the first step towards robot swarms that automatically discover suitable swarm strategies in the wild,” said research co-lead Dr Hauert, senior lecturer in Robotics at Bristol University’s Department of Engineering Mathematics and Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL).
“The next step will be to get these robot swarms out of the lab and demonstrate our proposed approach in real-world applications.”
