Learning distributed control for modular robots

Paulina Varshavskaya, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Daniela Rus

Abstract: We propose to automate controller design for distributed modular robots. In this paper, we present some initial experiments with learning distributed controllers for synthesizing compliant locomotion gaits for modular, self-reconfigurable robots. We use both centralized and distributed policy search and find that the learning approach is promising, as locomotion tasks are learnt well. We also find that the additive nature of the robotic platforms can help speed up learning if we increase the robot size incrementally.