An incremental approach to an evolutionary robotic swarm.

Swarm robotics is the research field of multi-robot systems which consist of many homogeneous autonomous robots without any type of global controllers. In this paper, an evolutionary robotics approach, i.e., the method that the robot controllers are designed by evolutionary algorithms with artificial neural networks, is applied. And we apply an incremental approach to evolution within the context of evolutionary robotics, so as to obtain controllers that has high generalization capability. As a benchmark of robotic swarm, cooperative food-foraging problems are conducted to examine their performance. In particular, The flexibility and scalability of the neural controllers are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]