Evolution of Implicit and Explicit Communication in Mobile Robots

Abstract

Abstract. This work investigates the conditions in which a population of embodied agents evolved for the ability to display coordinated/cooperative skills can develop an ability to communicate, whether and to what extent the evolved communication system can complexifies during the course of the evolutionary process, and how the characteristics of such communication system varies evolutionarily. The analysis of the obtained results indicates that evolving robots develop a capacity to access/generate information which has a communicative value, an ability to produce different signals encoding useful regularities, and an ability to react appropriately to explicit and implicit signals. The analysis of the obtained results allows us to formulate detailed hypothesis on the evolution of communication for what concern aspects such us: (i) how communication can emerge from a population of initially noncommunicating agents, (ii) how communication systems can complexifies, (iii) how signals/meanings can originate and how they can be grounded in agents sensory-motor states.

Cooperative Robotics in Robocup Soccer is Not Just Playing a Game Andrea Bonarini

“…There are two possible directions, in our view: on the one hand, more complex behaviours can be evolved by providing more capabilities and more structure to the individual controllers. In this case, complex individual behaviours support the cooperation between individuals, for instance, through the development of a cooperative language that can help regulating the inter-individual interactions [De Greef and Nolfi, 2009]. We believe that another, very promising and yet-to-be-explored direction should fully rely on self-organisation for producing distributed, cognitive robotic systems.…”

Evolving goal-driven multi-agent communication: what, when, and to whom

“…Further, emergence of communication has also been applied to gain insight into the origin and evolution of communication. Examples include investigating the evolutionary origins of robots' communication system [27], and studying the development of a communication system in evolutionary robots that are initially non-communicating [10,28,35].…”

“…This strategy is ideal for information instances that need immediate response, or reaction from others, or when delay is not tolerated. • Every time interval [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]: Agents are allowed to communicate only at specific time-steps, separated by an evolved time interval. For instance, if T = 3, then agents are allowed to communicate value updates of an information instance every three time-steps.…”

Emergence of communication and language in evolving robots

“…The 20 best genotypes in each generation are allowed to reproduce by generating five copies each, with 2% of their bits replaced with a new randomly selected value. For more details, see de Greeff and Nolfi (2010).…”