When Less Is More in Embodied Evolution: Robotic Swarms Have Better Evolvability with Constrained Communication

Abstract

Embodied evolution is an evolutionary robotics approach that implements an evolutionary algorithm over a population of robots and evolves while the robots perform their tasks. In embodied evolution, robots send and receive genomes from their neighbors and generate an offspring genome from the exchanged genomes. This study focused on the effects of the communication range for exchanging genomes on the evolvability of embodied evolution. Experiments were conducted using computer simulations, where robot controllers were evolved during a two-target navigation task. The results of the experiments showed that the robotic swarm could achieve better performance by reducing the communication range for exchanging genomes.