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The Emergence of Multi-cellular Robot Organisms through On-Line On-Board Evolution

2012; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-642-29178-4_13

1611-3349

Berend Weel, Evert Haasdijk, A. E. Eiben,

Distributed Control Multi-Agent Systems

We investigate whether a swarm of robots can evolve controllers that cause aggregation into 'multi-cellular' robot organisms without a specific reward to do so. To this end, we create a world where aggregated robots receive more energy than individual ones and enable robots to evolve their controllers on-the-fly, during their lifetime. We perform experiments in six different implementations of the basic idea distinguished by the system of energy distribution and the level of advantage aggregated robots have over individual ones. The results show that 'multi-cellular' robot organisms emerge in all of these cases.