Evolving robot controllers for structured environments through environment decomposition

Abstract

In this paper we aim to develop a controller that allows a robot to traverse an structured environment. The approach we use is to decompose the environment into simple sub-environments that we use as basis for evolving the controller. Specifically, we decompose a narrow corridor environment into four different sub-environments and evolve controllers that generalize to traverse two larger environments composed of the sub-environments. We also study two strategies for presenting the sub-environments to the evolutionary algorithm: all sub-environments at the same time and in sequence. Results show that by using a sequence the evolutionary algorithm can find a controller that performs well in all sub-environments more consistently than when presenting all subenvironments together. We conclude that environment decomposition is an useful approach for evolving controllers for structured environments and that the order in which the decomposed sub-environments are presented in sequence impacts the performance of the evolutionary algorithm.