An evolutionary controller for autonomous multi-robot systems

This article describes the implementation of a robot with an evolutionary control scheme, and experiments to examine evolutionary control with a population of five physical autonomous mobile robots. The control for the robots is totally embedded and performs collision-free behaviour. Both morphological features and the controller circuit are evolved. The robots constantly adapt to changes of surroundings by modifying their features and the weights of the RAM neural controller. The paper describes the evolutionary system and the results of experiments. These show that in relatively complex navigation tasks the proposed system evolves very quickly to develop a robust control system.