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Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…
As advances in artificial intelligence enable increasingly capable learning-based autonomous agents, it becomes more challenging for human observers to efficiently construct a mental model of the agent's behaviour. In order to successfully…
In swarm robotics, any of the robots in a swarm may be affected by different faults, resulting in significant performance declines. To allow fault recovery from randomly injected faults to different robots in a swarm, a model-free approach…
Many socio-economic and biological processes can be modeled as systems of interacting individuals. The behaviour of such systems can be often described within game-theoretic models. In these lecture notes, we introduce fundamental concepts…
When researching robot swarms, many studies observe complex group behavior emerging from the individual agents' simple local actions. However, the task of learning an individual policy to produce a desired group behavior remains a…
Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a popular approach for robots to acquire new skills, but most LfD methods suffer from imperfections in human demonstrations. Prior work typically treats these suboptimalities as random noise. In this…
We develop a dynamical systems approach to prioritizing and selecting multiple recurring tasks with the aim of conferring a degree of deliberative goal selection to a mobile robot confronted with competing objectives. We take navigation as…
A fascinating aspect of nature lies in its ability to produce a collection of organisms that are all high-performing in their niche. Quality-Diversity (QD) methods are evolutionary algorithms inspired by this observation, that obtained…
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…
Quality-Diversity is a family of evolutionary algorithms that generate diverse, high-performing solutions through local competition principles inspired by natural evolution. While research has focused on improving specific aspects of…
In recent years, Evolutionary Strategies were actively explored in robotic tasks for policy search as they provide a simpler alternative to reinforcement learning algorithms. However, this class of algorithms is often claimed to be…
Recent work from the reinforcement learning community has shown that Evolution Strategies are a fast and scalable alternative to other reinforcement learning methods. In this paper we show that Evolution Strategies are a special case of…
In this paper, we study representation learning for multi-task decision-making in non-stationary environments. We consider the framework of sequential linear bandits, where the agent performs a series of tasks drawn from distinct sets…
Developing applications considering reactiveness, scalability and re-usability has always been at the center of attention of robotic researchers. Behavior-based architectures have been proposed as a programming paradigm to develop robust…
Swarm behavior emerges from the local interaction of agents and their environment often encoded as simple rules. Extracting the rules by watching a video of the overall swarm behavior could help us study and control swarm behavior in…
Robot swarms offer inherent robustness and the capacity to execute complex, collaborative tasks surpassing the capabilities of single-agent systems. Co-designing these systems is critical, as marginal improvements in individual performance…
Many species in nature demonstrate symbiotic relationships leading to emergent behaviors through cooperation, which are sometimes beyond the scope of the partnerships within the same species. These symbiotic relationships are classified as…
Most of the grand challenges of humanity today involve complex agent-based systems, such as epidemiology, economics or ecology. However, remains as a pending task the challenge of identifying the general principles underlying their…
The complexity of a legged robot's environment or task can inform how specialised its gait must be to ensure success. Evolving specialised robotic gaits demands many evaluations - acceptable for computer simulations, but not for physical…
One of the main problems of evolutionary algorithms is the convergence of the population to local minima. In this paper, we explore techniques that can avoid this problem by encouraging a diverse behavior of the agents through a shared…