A development environment for evolutionary robotics

Abstract

Evolutionary robotics is an exciting new area of research with the potential to provide ways to build robots that are beyond our current design abilities. Instead of building robots from the ground up, as with other approaches, robot controllers are evolved using algorithms inspired by biological evolution. The purpose of this work is to develop a tool for the evolution of mobile robot controllers. The controllers are evolved in a realistic simulation. The evolutionary algorithms are provided by the GALib library. Testing demonstrates that the system is capable of producing useful robot controllers. Users can configure the system so that a variety of controller types can be evolved. With a system such as this, users can conduct a range of experiments without having to create custom software.