Evolvability of Neuromodulated Learning for Robots

Abstract

Neuromodulation is thought to be one of the underlying principles of learning and memory in biological neural networks. Recent experiments have shown that neuroevolutionary methods benefit from neuromodulation in simple grid-world problems. In this paper we investigate the performance of a neuroevolutionary method applied to a more realistic robotic task. While confirming the favorable effect of neuromodulatory structures, our results indicate that the evolution of such architectures requires a mechanism which allows for selective modular targetting of the neuromodulatory connections.