Generating collective behavior of a multi-legged robotic swarm using an evolutionary robotics approach

Daichi Morimoto, Motoaki Hiraga, Naoya Shiozaki, Kazuhiro Ohkura, Masaharu Munetomo

Abstract: This paper demonstrates to generate a collective behavior of a multi-legged robotic swarm based on the evolutionary robotics approach. Most studies in swarm robotics are conducted using mobile robots driven by wheels. This paper focuses on generating collective behavior using a multi-legged robotic swarm. The evolutionary robotics approach is employed for designing a robot controller. The intuition-based constraint factors are incorporated into the fitness function to make the gait of robots similar to natural organisms. The experiment on a task of forming a line is conducted in computer simulations using the PyBullet physics engine. The robot controller is represented by a recurrent neural network with a single hidden layer. The experimental results show that proposed constraint factors successfully designed the robot’s gait similar to natural organisms. The results also show that the evolutionary robotics approach successfully designed the robot controller for collective behavior of a multi-legged robotic swarm.