Tè Darwiniano 


 

Lunedì 18 Marzo 2002, Elio Tuci - psicologo che in passato ha svolto il tirocinio al GRAL - ci ha parlato del lavoro che sta svolgendo come PhD student presso la School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex, UK). In particolare, ci ha presentato:



Evolving integrated controllers for autonomous learning robots using
dynamic neural network

Abstract
A growing amount of research in Evolutionary Robotics has been focusing on the evolution of controllers with the ability to modify the behaviour of a robot, in order to adapt to variation in its operating conditions. During my talk, I'll briefly review this research area, focusing more extensively on the Yamauchi and Beer 1994 work.

Yamauchi and Beer's approach clearly represents one of the first attempts in which continuous time recurrent neural  networks have been exploited to integrate reactive, sequential and learned behaviour in a simulated robot. However, I point out that, although a promising one, the Yamauchi and Beer's approach is not completely satisfactory because the autonomy of the simulated agent is severely compromised by an external reinforcement signal and externally imposed modularization of the controller.

Our simulation, go beyond the Yamauchi and Beer approach, demonstrating that it is possible to evolve an integrated dynamic neural network, with fixed connection weights and leaky-integrator neurons that successfully control the behaviour of a khepera robot engaged in a learning task, similar to one proposed by Yamauchi and Beer. I show experimental results, and make comparisons with the original Yamauchi and Beer experiment. I discuss the differences that made it possible for us to evolve an integrated dynamic neural network where we assume neither an a priori separated controller module nor an a priori external reinforcement signal as in Yamauchi94. I end by drawing the work together in the conclusion.
 
Reference
Tuci, E., Harvey, I. and Quinn, M. (in press). Evolving integrated controllers for autonomous learning robots using dynamic neural networks. Proceedings of The Seventh International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB'02), 4-9 August 2002, Edinburgh, UK
 

 copyright ©2002 Raffaele Calabretta. All Rights Reserved.

Ultima modifica: 04-2002
Torna all'Home Page del Tè Darwiniano