Related papers: Open-Ended Evolutionary Robotics: an Information T…
Self-organization is the autonomous assembly of a network of interacting components into a stable, organized pattern. This article shows that the process of self-assembly can be encoded in terms of evolutionary entropy, a statistical…
Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…
Both entropy-minimizing and entropy-maximizing (curiosity) objectives for unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) have been shown to be effective in different environments, depending on the environment's level of natural entropy. However,…
Maximum entropy reinforcement learning integrates exploration into policy learning by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to the entropy of some distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel approach in which the intrinsic…
In this paper, we introduce a model of evolution and learning in robots that co-optimizes a distribution of latent design vectors (genotypes) and a mixture of control experts (neural modules), which are gated by the latent coordinates of…
The art of solving the Mastermind puzzle was initiated by Donald Knuth and is already more than 30 years old; despite that, it still receives much attention in operational research and computer games journals, not to mention the…
Evolutionary Robotics offers the possibility to design robots to solve a specific task automatically by optimizing their morphology and control together. However, this co-optimization of body and control is challenging, because controllers…
This paper provides an overview of evolutionary robotics techniques applied to on-line distributed evolution for robot collectives -- namely, embodied evolution. It provides a definition of embodied evolution as well as a thorough…
We show that dynamical gain modulation of neurons' stimulus response is described as an information-theoretic cycle that generates entropy associated with the stimulus-related activity from entropy produced by the modulation. To articulate…
We propose an approach of open-ended evolution via the simulation of swarm dynamics. In nature, swarms possess remarkable properties, which allow many organisms, from swarming bacteria to ants and flocking birds, to form higher-order…
The scientific method relies on the iterated processes of inference and inquiry. The inference phase consists of selecting the most probable models based on the available data; whereas the inquiry phase consists of using what is known about…
Designing effective control policies for autonomous systems remains a fundamental challenge, traditionally addressed through reinforcement learning or manual engineering. While reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable success, it…
Evolutionary multi-task optimization (EMTO) is an advanced optimization paradigm that improves search efficiency by enabling knowledge transfer across multiple tasks solved in parallel. Accordingly, a broad range of knowledge transfer…
Quantifying behaviors of robots which were generated autonomously from task-independent objective functions is an important prerequisite for objective comparisons of algorithms and movements of animals. The temporal sequence of such a…
In collective robotic systems, the automatic generation of controllers for complex tasks is still a challenging problem. Open-ended evolution of complex robot behaviors can be a possible solution whereby an intrinsic driver for pattern…
Computing diverse sets of high-quality solutions has gained increasing attention among the evolutionary computation community in recent years. It allows practitioners to choose from a set of high-quality alternatives. In this paper, we…
Applications of large-scale mobile multi-robot systems can be beneficial over monolithic robots because of higher potential for robustness and scalability. Developing controllers for multi-robot systems is challenging because the multitude…
Locomotion may be induced on three levels. On a classical level, actuators and limbs follow the sequence of open-loop top-down control signals they receive. Limbs may move alternatively on their own, which implies that interlimb…
Evolutionary robotics has aimed to optimize robot control and morphology to produce better and more robust robots. Most previous research only addresses optimization of control, and does this only in simulation. We have developed a…
Contextual policy search allows adapting robotic movement primitives to different situations. For instance, a locomotion primitive might be adapted to different terrain inclinations or desired walking speeds. Such an adaptation is often…