The emergence of multi-cellular robot organisms through on-line on-board evolution

Abstract

We investigate whether a swarm of robots can evolve controllers that cause aggregation into 'multi-cellular' robot organisms without a specific reward to do so. To this end, we create a world where aggregated robots receive more energy than individual ones and enable robots to evolve their controllers on-the-fly, during their lifetime. We perform experiments in six different implementations of the basic idea distinguished by the system of energy distribution and the level of advantage aggregated robots have over individual ones. The results show that 'multi-cellular' robot organisms emerge in all of these cases. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.