Diploma Thesis DIP-3027

BibliographyMattes, Michael: Design and Implementation of a Framework for Online Evolution of Robotic Behaviour.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology, Diploma Thesis No. 3027 (2010).
67 pages, english.
CR-SchemaD.2.2 (Software Engineering Design Tools and Techniques)
Abstract

The framework is written in C++ as a plug-in to the existing symbricator simula- tion environment that is an extension of delta3D simulation engine. The simulation environment provides models of existing robots complete with sensors and actua- tors, a mechanism to add controllers to the robots and arenas to deploy them to. The robot controllers use the sensor inputs to compute activation values for the actuators. The computation of the activation values for each robot is done by ar- tificial neural networks. Generating those neural networks is the main purpose of the framework. Generally they are created by an evolutionary algorithms and are evolved over a period of time to show the desired robotic behavior. The graphviz C API is used to save resulting nets to disk, to visualize them or to load existing nets from disk to use them as a starting point for evolution or to ob- serve the behavior of robots controlled by them. One of the main problems using evolutionary algorithms is evaluating the behavior shown by the robotic. This is complicated further by the principle of online evolution, which means only data available to the robot can be used for evaluation. Fitness functions assign a score to the behavior shown by the robot which is used in the process of evolution. To alleviate the problems of evaluating robotic behavior a set of fitness functions suit- able for standard scenarios like wall following and food gathering will be provided by the framework. They can either be used to test and compare new evolutionary algorithms or as an example and starting point for customized fitness functions. After finishing evolution within the simulation environment, the controller net- works must be transferred to real robots where they must adapt themselves to the changes in their environment. To help users with this task all necessary framework classes like classes for neural networks, evolutionary algorithms as well as robot controllers are written in such a way that permits using them within the simulation environment as well as within real hardware.

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Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems, Image Understanding
Superviser(s)Schlachter Florian
Entry dateJuly 7, 2010
   Publ. Computer Science