Computational intelligence in autonomous mobile robotics-A review

In the recent decades the application of artificial evolution to autonomous mobile robots to enable them to adapt their behaviors to changes of the environments has attracted much attention. For example, the robots in next generation should be able to carry out work in unstructured dynamic human environments. As a result, an infant research field called evolutionary robotics (ER) has been quickly developed that is primarily concerned with the use of computation intelligence techniques for the automatic design of adaptive robots. The paper intends to discuss the applications of computational intelligence in the field of autonomous robotics. As an innovative and effective solution to autonomous robot controller design, it can derive adaptive robotic controllers capable of elegantly dealing with continuous changes in unstructured environments in an efficient manner. In the paper, the basic concepts regarding computational intelligence and evolutionary robotics are introduced, and then a variety of successful applications of computational intelligence in autonomous robotics along the dimension of computation intelligence adopted are surveyed and discussed. Future research in this field is also suggested. Finally, conclusions are drawn.