An evolutionary approach to road following: a simulated case study

Abstract

Autonomous robot road following has been widely investi-gated since the early 1980s and, whilst much progress has been shown, there is still no system which displays 100% generality across all types of problem. This work shows a novel approach to the problem, using the methodology of Evolutionary Robotics to facilitate the autonomous emer-gence of flexible, robust and general behaviours. One of the unique aspects of this approach is to encourage the evolution of a dynamic strategy of colour perception: facilitating the combination of different channels of the colour space to per-ceive contrast across a range of scenes where this would oth-erwise be impossible. The results described herein demon-strate the capability of this methodology to produce con-trollers capable of generalising across a broad range of road shapes to which the agents have not been previously exposed. They also vindicate the effectiveness of a dynamic colour per-ception strategy, enabling the controllers to perceive contrast in a challenging variety of situations.