Evolving Instinctive Behaviour in Resource-Constrained Autonomous Agents Using Grammatical Evolution

Abstract

Recent developments in the miniaturization of hardware have facilitated the use of robots or mobile sensory agents in many applications such as exploration of GPS-denied, hardly accessible unknown environments. This includes underground resource exploration and water pollution monitoring. One problem in scaling-down robots is that it puts significant emphasis on power consumption due to the limited energy available online. Furthermore, the design of adequate controllers for such agents is challenging as representing the system mathematically is difficult due to complexity. In that regard, Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) is a suitable choice for developing the controllers. However, the solution space for evolving those controllers is relatively large because of the wide range of the possible tunable parameters available on the hardware, in addition to the numerous number of objectives which appear on different design levels. A recently-proposed method, dubbed as Instinct Evolution Scheme (IES), offered a way to limit the solution space in these cases. This scheme uses Behavior Trees (BTs) to represent the robot behaviour in a modular, re-usable and intelligible fashion. In this paper, we improve upon the original IES by using Grammatical evolution (GE) to implement a full BT evolution model integratable with IES. A special emphasis is put on minimizing the complexity of the BT generated by GE. To test the scheme, we consider an environment exploration task on a virtual environment. Results show 85% correct reactions to environment stimuli and a decrease in relative complexity to 4.7%. Finally, the evolved BT is represented in an if-else on-chip compatible format.