Generating collective behavior of a robotic swarm using an attention agent with deep neuroevolution

Abstract

This paper focuses on generating collective behavior of a robotic swarm using an attention agent. The selective attention mechanism enables an agent to cope with environmental variations which are irrelevant to the task. This paper applies attention mechanisms to a robotic swarm for enhancing system-level properties, such as flexibility or scalability. To train an attention agent, evolutionary computations become a promising method, because a controller structure is not restricted by a gradient-based method. Therefore, this paper employs a deep neuroevolution approach to generating collective behavior in a robotic swarm. The experiments are conducted by computer simulations that consist of the Unity 3D game engine. The performance of the attention agent is compared with the convolutional neural network approach. The experimental results showed that the attention agent obtained generalization abilities in a robotic swarm similar to single-agent problems.