Evolving reliable and robust controllers for real robots by genetic programming

Abstract

 Using Genetic Programming (GP)-based approaches to evolve robot controllers has the advantage of operating variable-size genotype. This is an important feature for evolving robot control systems as it allows complete freedom for the control architecture in respect to the task complexity which is difficult to predict. However, GP-based work in evolving controllers has been questioned in the verification of the performance on real robots, the generalisation of defining primitives, and the computational cost needed. In this paper, we present our GP framework in which a special representation of the robot controller is designed; this representation can capture well the characteristic of a behaviour controller so that our system can efficiently evolve desired robot behaviours by a relatively low computational cost. This system has been successfully used to evolve reliable and robust controllers working on a real robot, for a variety of tasks.