Cooperative and competitive behavior acquisition for mobile robots through co-evolution

Abstract

This paper discusses how multiple robots can emerge cooperative and competitive behaviors through co-evolutionary processes. A genetic programming method is applied to individual population corresponding to each robot so as to obtain cooperative and competitive behaviors. The complexity of the problem can be explained twofold: coevolution for cooperative behaviors needs exact synchronization of mutual evolutions, and three robot co-evolution requires wellcomplicated environment setups that may gradually change from simpler to more complicated situations. As an example task, several simplified soccer games are selected to show the validity of the proposed methods. Simulation results with fixed and varying fitness functions are shown, and a discussion is given. 1