Related papers: Evolution of sustained foraging in 3D environments…
The sustainable foraging problem is a dynamic environment testbed for exploring the forms of agent cognition in dealing with social dilemmas in a multi-agent setting. The agents need to resist the temptation of individual rewards through…
We develop a set of equations to describe the population dynamics of many interacting species in food webs. Predator-prey interactions are non-linear, and are based on ratio-dependent functional responses. The equations account for…
Previous human foraging experiments have shown that human groups routinely undermatch environmental resources much like other animal species. In this experiment, we test whether humans also selectively rely on others as information sources…
We studied the long-term dynamics of evolutionary Swarm Chemistry by extending the simulation length ten-fold compared to earlier work and by developing and using a new automated object harvesting method. Both macroscopic dynamics and…
Living in groups brings benefits to many animals, such as a protection against predators and an improved capacity for sensing and making decisions while searching for resources in uncertain environments. A body of studies has shown how…
Animals often demonstrate a remarkable ability to adapt to their environments during their lifetime. They do so partly due to the evolution of morphological and neural structures. These structures capture features of environments shared…
Optimizing gait stability for legged robots is a difficult problem. Even on level surfaces, effectively traversing across different textures (e.g., carpet) rests on dynamically tuning parameters in multidimensional space. Inspired by…
We successfully evolved a neural network controller that produces dynamic walking in a simulated bipedal robot with compliant actuators, a difficult control problem. The evolutionary evaluation uses a detailed software simulation of a…
Patch foraging is one of the most heavily studied behavioral optimization challenges in biology. However, despite its importance to biological intelligence, this behavioral optimization problem is understudied in artificial intelligence…
Efficient navigation in swarms often relies on the emergence of decentralized approaches that minimize traversal time or energy. Stigmergy, where agents modify a shared environment that then modifies their behavior, is a classic mechanism…
Reproducing the diverse and agile locomotion skills of animals has been a longstanding challenge in robotics. While manually-designed controllers have been able to emulate many complex behaviors, building such controllers involves a…
Creating autonomous, self-supporting, self-replicating, sustainable systems is a great challenge. To some extent, understanding life means not only being able to create it from scratch, but also improving, supporting, saving it, or even…
Foraging is a crucial activity, yet the extent to which humans employ flexible versus rigid strategies remains unclear. This study investigates how individuals adapt their foraging strategies in response to resource distribution and…
Designing controllers for robot swarms is challenging, because human developers have typically no good understanding of the link between the details of a controller that governs individual robots and the swarm behavior that is an indirect…
Body size or mass is one of the main factors underlying food webs structure. A large number of evolutionary models have shown that indeed, the adaptive evolution of body size (or mass) can give rise to hierarchically organised trophic…
Some of the most challenging environments on our planet are accessible to quadrupedal animals but remain out of reach for autonomous machines. Legged locomotion can dramatically expand the operational domains of robotics. However,…
This study investigates a method to guide and control fish schools using virtual fish trained with reinforcement learning. We utilize 2D virtual fish displayed on a screen to overcome technical challenges such as durability and movement…
Robots operating in the real world will experience a range of different environments and tasks. It is essential for the robot to have the ability to adapt to its surroundings to work efficiently in changing conditions. Evolutionary robotics…
We analyze the movement of a starving forager on a one-dimensional periodic lattice, where each location contains one unit of food. As the forager lands on sites with food, it consumes the food, leaving the sites empty. If the forager lands…
An agent-based model of population dynamics is presented. The model has as its expected behaviour the population dynamics of the equation-based Webworld model, within which large communities of species can be grown on evolutionary time…