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Evolving Behaviour Trees for Swarm Robotics

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Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics ((SPAR,volume 6))

Abstract

Controllers for swarms of robots are hard to design as swarm behaviour emerges from their interaction, and so controllers are often evolved. However, these evolved controllers are often difficult to understand, limiting our ability to predict swarm behaviour. We suggest behaviour trees are a good control architecture for swarm robotics, as they are comprehensible and promote modular reuse. We design a foraging task for kilobots and evolve a behaviour tree capable of performing that task, both in simulation and reality, and show the controller is compact and understandable.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Perhaps mirroring a fundamental property of nature [6].

  2. 2.

    Chosen in simulation as a reasonable compromise between responsiveness and stability.

  3. 3.

    Due to the elitism policy, three individuals per generation are unchanged and need no fitness evaluation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of the West of England, Bristol, BS161QY, UK

    Simon Jones, Matthew Studley, Sabine Hauert & Alan Winfield

Authors
  1. Simon Jones
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  2. Matthew Studley
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  3. Sabine Hauert
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  4. Alan Winfield
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Simon Jones .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Roderich Groß

  2. Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Andreas Kolling

  3. School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy (SEMTE), Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Spring Berman

  4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Emilio Frazzoli

  5. ENAC, IIE, DIAL, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland

    Alcherio Martinoli

  6. Department of Mechanical Engineering and Science, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

    Fumitoshi Matsuno

  7. Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Melvin Gauci

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Jones, S., Studley, M., Hauert, S., Winfield, A. (2018). Evolving Behaviour Trees for Swarm Robotics. In: Groß, R., et al. Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73008-0_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73008-0_34

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