Deriving minimal sensory configurations for evolved cooperative robot teams

Abstract

This paper presents a study on the impact of different robot sensory configurations (morphologies) in simulated robot teams that must accomplish a collective (cooperative) behavior task. The study's objective was to investigate if effective collective behaviors could be efficiently evolved given minimal morphological complexity of individual robots in an homogenous team. A range of sensory configurations are tested in company with evolved controllers for a collective construction task. Results indicate that a minimal sensory configuration yields the highest task performance, and increasing the complexity of the sensory configuration does not yield an increased task performance.