Complex Behavior in Evolutionary Robotics

2 Robotics, Evolution and Simulation

Preamble: When watching a swarm of autonomous robots perform even the simplest actions such as driving around randomly while avoiding to crash into each other, an impression of a highly complex and unpredictable system arises, and it is hard not to draw an analogy to populations of living organisms. Somehow it seems obvious to try to transfer some of the intriguing mechanisms from nature to such artificial robot populations and to look if an intelligent system can emerge. Trying to do so, it soon gets obvious that there is still a long road to follow until the underlying mechanisms will be understood sufficiently well to be used in a practical way for the automatic generation of intelligent, robust and controllable ...