Coordinating multi-rover systems: evaluation functions for dynamic and noisy environments

• Authors: Kagan Tumer;Adrian Agogino
• Venue: GECCO '05 Proceedings of the 7th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
• Year: 2005

This paper addresses the evolution of control strategies for a collective: a set of entities that collectively strives to maximize a global evaluation function that rates the performance of the full system. Directly addressing such problems by having a population of collectives and applying the evolutionary algorithm to that population is appealing, but the search space is prohibitively large in most cases. Instead, we focus on evolving control policies for each member of the collective. The main difficulty with this approach is creating an evaluation function for each member of the collective that is both aligned with the global evaluation function and sensitive to the fitness changes of the member. We show how to construct evaluation functions in dynamic, noisy and communication-limited collective environments. On a rover coordination problem, a control policy evolved using aligned and member-sensitive evaluations outperforms global evaluation methods by up to 400%. More notably, in the presence of a larger number of rovers or rovers with noisy and communication limited sensors, the improvements due to the proposed method become significantly more pronounced.