Open-ended On-board Evolutionary Robotics for Robot Swarms

The SYMBRION project stands at the crossroads of Artificial Life and Evolutionary Robotics: a swarm of real robots undergoes online evolution by exchanging information in a decentralized Evolutionary Robotics Scheme: the diffusion of each individual's genotype depends both on its ability to survive in an unknown environment as well as its ability to maximize mating opportunities during its lifetime, which suggests an implicit fitness. This paper presents early research and prospective ideas in the context of large-scale swarm robotics projects, focusing on the open-ended evolutionary approach in the SYMBRION project. One key issue of this work is to perform on-board evolution in a spatially distributed population of robots. A real-world experiment is also described which yields important considerations regarding open-ended evolution with real autonomous robots. © 2009 IEEE.status: publishe