Racing to improve on-line, on-board evolutionary robotics

Abstract

In evolutionary robotics, robot controllers are often evolved in a separate development phase preceding actual deployment - we call this off-line evolution. In on-line evolutionary robotics, by contrast, robot controllers adapt through evolution while the robots perform their proper tasks, not in a separate preliminary phase. In this case, individual robots can contain their own self-sufficient evolutionary algorithm (the encapsulated approach) where individuals are typically evaluated by means of a time sharing scheme: an individual is given the run of the robot for some amount of time and fitness corresponds to the robot's task performance in that period.