KheperaDiscriminationExperiment

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• The Discrimination Experiment

The Discrimination Experiment

The KheperaDiscriminationExperiment plugin enables the user to replicate one of the first evolutionary robotics experiment that were carried out in the world (Nolfi, 1996) which still represents one of the best demonstration of how adaptive robots that develop their skills autonomously in interaction with the environment can discover simple and effective solutions that can be hard to imagine from a human designer. In conjunction with the documentation included in (Nolfi, 2016, chapter 2-3), this experiment constitutes a perfect first example to gain practical knowledge on Evolutionary Robotics.

The experiment involves a Khepera robot provided with a neural network controller with six sensory neurons (that encode the state of the six frontal infrared sensors) directly connected to two motor neurons (that encode the desired speed of the robot’s wheels) located in an arena surrounded by walls and containing a cylindrical object. The task of the robot is that to find and remain close to the cylinder. A video of the evolved behaviour is available from this page.

References

Nolfi S. (2016). Adaptive Robots: Exploring the Complex Adaptive System Nature of Behaviuor and Cognition. Roma, Italy: CNR-ISTC.

Nolfi S. (1996). Adaptation as a more powerful tool than decomposition and integration. In: T.Fogarty and G.Venturini (Eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Evolutionary Computing and Machine Learning, 13th International Conference on Machine Learning, University of Bari, Italy.