Considerations in the application of evolution to the generation of robot controllers, Inform. Sci. 133 (3–4) (2001) 127–148.Sung-Bae Cho (Member, IEEE) received the B.S. degree in computer science from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, in 1988 and the M.S

This paper is concerned with different aspects of the use of evolution for the successful generation of real robot ANN controllers. Several parameters of an evolutionary/genetic algorithm and the way they influence the evolution of ANN behavioral controllers for real robots have been contemplated. These parameters include the way the initial populations are distributed, how the individuals are evaluated, the implementation of race schemes, etc. A batch of experiments on the evolution of three types of behaviors with different population sizes have been carried out in order to ascertain their effect on the evolution of the controllers and their validity in real implementations. The results provide a guide to the design of evolutionary algorithms for generating ANN based robot controllers, especially when, due to computational constraints, the populations to be used are small with respect to the complexity of the problem to be solved. The problem of transferring the controllers evolved in simulated environments to the real systems operating in real environments are also considered and we present results of this transference to reality with a robot which has few and extremely noisy sensors