Coupling evolution and information theory for autonomous robotic exploration

Abstract

This paper investigates a hybrid two-phase approach toward exploratory behavior in robotics. In a first phase, controllers are evolved to maximize the quantity of information in the sensori-motor datastream generated by the robot. In a second phase, the data acquired by the evolved controllers is used to support an information theory-based controller, selecting the most informative action in each time step. The approach, referred to as EvITE, is shown to outperform both the evolutionary and the information theory-based approaches standalone, in terms of actual exploration of the arena. Further, the EvITE controller features some generality property, being able to efficiently explore other arenas than the one considered during the first evolutionary phase.