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Observing the Effects of Overdesign in the Automatic Design of Control Software for Robot Swarms

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Swarm Intelligence (ANTS 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9882))

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Abstract

We present the results of an experiment in the automatic design of control software for robot swarms. We conceived the experiment to corroborate a hypothesis that we proposed in a previous publication: the reality gap problem bears strong resemblance to the generalization problem faced in supervised learning. In particular, thanks to this experiment we observe for the first time a phenomenon that we shall call overdesign. Overdesign is the automatic design counterpart of the well known overfitting problem encountered in machine learning. Past an optimal level of the design effort, the longer the design process is protracted, the better the performance of the swarm becomes in simulation and the worst in reality. Our results show that some sort of early stopping mechanism could be beneficial.

This research was conceived by MB and GF and was directed by MB. The experiment was performed by YK using automatic design software developed by BD on the basis of a previous version by GF. The article was drafted by MB and GF. All authors read the manuscript and provided feedback. BD is currently with the Department of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Genova, Italy.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a more advanced and general treatment of the issue, see also [57].

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Acknowledgments

Mauro Birattari acknowledges support from the Belgian F.R.S.–FNRS, of which he is a Senior Research Associate.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Mauro Birattari, Brian Delhaisse, Gianpiero Francesca & Yvon Kerdoncuff

  2. ENSTA ParisTech, Palaiseau, France

    Yvon Kerdoncuff

Authors
  1. Mauro Birattari
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  2. Brian Delhaisse
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  3. Gianpiero Francesca
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  4. Yvon Kerdoncuff
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mauro Birattari .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Université Libre de Bruxelles , Bruxelles, Belgium

    Marco Dorigo

  2. Université Libre de Bruxelles , Bruxelles, Belgium

    Mauro Birattari

  3. RMIT University , Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Xiaodong Li

  4. University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

    Manuel López-Ibáñez

  5. Hiroshima University , Hiroshima, Japan

    Kazuhiro Ohkura

  6. École Polytechnique de Montréal , Montréal, Québec, Canada

    Carlo Pinciroli

  7. Université Libre de Bruxelles IRIDIA, CoDE, Brüssel, Belgium

    Thomas Stützle

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Birattari, M., Delhaisse, B., Francesca, G., Kerdoncuff, Y. (2016). Observing the Effects of Overdesign in the Automatic Design of Control Software for Robot Swarms. In: Dorigo, M., et al. Swarm Intelligence. ANTS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9882. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44427-7_13

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