On-Board Evolutionary Algorithm and Off-Line Rule Discovery for Column Formation in Swarm Robotics

This paper aims at building autonomous controllers for swarm robots, specifically aimed at enforcing a given shape formation, here a column formation. The proposed approach features two main characteristics. Firstly, a state-of-the-art evolutionary setting is used to achieve the on-board optimization of the controller, avoiding any simulator-based approach. Secondly, as the cost of physical experiments might be prohibitively high for plain evolutionary approaches, a data mining approach is achieved on the top of evolution, rule discovery is used to discover the most promising regions in the controller search space. The merits of the approach are experimentally validated using a 5 robot formation, showing that the hybrid evolutionary learning process outperforms evolution alone in terms of swarm speed and shape quality.