Cooperative observation of multiple moving targets: an evolutionary approach

The interest for cooperative robots has increased considerably in recent years and one of the research issues within this domain is how to evolve heterogeneity in a team. The research today is however either focusing on diversity in hardware (e.g. sensory system) or diversity of behaviour. This dissertation extends this research and presents experiments that attempts to 'co-evolve' heterogeneity at both the hardware level and the behavioural level. The results show that the team behaviour evolved depends on the complexity of the task where adding constraints or increasing the difficulty of the problem lead to better team behaviour. Our belief was that the performance of the team should benefit from using robots that has been evolved at the hardware level together with the behavioural level. This, however, could not be proved to be true, but the idea that these two should be kept together in order to evolve heterogeneity in a team is still believed