Related papers: Systematic Derivation of Behaviour Characterisatio…
Improving open-ended learning capabilities is a promising approach to enable robots to face the unbounded complexity of the real-world. Among existing methods, the ability of Quality-Diversity algorithms to generate large collections of…
"Looking for things" is a mundane but critical task we repeatedly carry on in our daily life. We introduce a method to develop a human character capable of searching for a randomly located target object in a detailed 3D scene using its…
Inspired by the notion of surprise for unconventional discovery we introduce a general search algorithm we name surprise search as a new method of evolutionary divergent search. Surprise search is grounded in the divergent search paradigm…
The specification and validation of robotics applications require bridging the gap between formulating requirements and systematic testing. This often involves manual and error-prone tasks that become more complex as requirements, design,…
Evolutionary Robotics allows robots with limited sensors and processing to tackle complex tasks by means of sensory-motor coordination. In this paper we show the first application of the Behaviour Tree framework to a real robotic platform…
Disordered systems theory provides powerful tools to analyze the generic behaviors of highdimensional systems, such as species-rich ecological communities or neural networks. By assuming randomness in their interactions, universality…
A fundamental aspect of behaviour is the ability to encode salient features of experience in memory and use these memories, in combination with current sensory information, to predict the best action for each situation such that long-term…
Domain adaptation is a common problem in robotics, with applications such as transferring policies from simulation to real world and lifelong learning. Performing such adaptation, however, requires informative data about the environment to…
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…
Autonomous robot swarms must be able to make fast and accurate collective decisions, but speed and accuracy are known to be conflicting goals. While collective decision-making is widely studied in swarm robotics research, only few works on…
Exploiting robots for activities in human-shared environments, whether warehouses, shopping centres or hospitals, calls for such robots to understand the underlying physical interactions between nearby agents and objects. In particular,…
Inter-individual differences are studied in natural systems, such as fish, bees, and humans, as they contribute to the complexity of both individual and collective behaviors. However, individuality in artificial systems, such as robotic…
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…
Autonomous robots may be able to adapt their behavior in response to changes in the environment. This is useful, for example, to efficiently handle limited resources or to respond appropriately to unexpected events such as faults. The…
Financial institutions mostly deal with people. Therefore, characterizing different kinds of human behavior can greatly help institutions for improving their relation with customers and with regulatory offices. In many of such interactions,…
Social robots are becoming increasingly diverse in their design, behavior, and usage. In this chapter, we provide a broad-ranging overview of the main characteristics that arise when one considers social robots and their interactions with…
Identifying and categorizing specific robot tasks, behaviors, and resources is an essential precursor to reproducing and evaluating robotics experiments across laboratories and platforms. Without some means of capturing how one environment,…
The possibility to use competitive evolutionary algorithms to generate long-term progress is normally prevented by the convergence on limit cycle dynamics in which the evolving agents keep progressing against their current competitors by…
The evolutionary balance between innate and learned behaviors is highly intricate, and different organisms have found different solutions to this problem. We hypothesize that the emergence and exact form of learning behaviors is naturally…
Simulation of population dynamics is a central research theme in computational biology, which contributes to understanding the interactions between predators and preys. Conventional mathematical tools of this theme, however, are incapable…