Evolving robust and specialized car racing skills

Neural network-based controllers are evolved for racing simulated R/C cars around several tracks of varying difficulty. The transferability of driving skills acquired when evolving for a single track is evaluated, and different ways of evolving controllers able to perform well on many different tracks are investigated. It is further shown that such generally proficient controllers can reliably be developed into specialized controllers for individual tracks. Evolution of sensor parameters together with network weights is shown to lead to higher final fitness, but only if turned on after a general controller is developed, otherwise it hinders evolution. It is argued that simulated car racing is a scalable and relevant testbed for evolutionary robotics research, and that the results of this research can be useful for commercial computer games

Evolving a rule system controller for automatic driving in a car racing competition

IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games. Perth, Australia, 15-18 December 2008.The techniques and the technologies supporting Automatic Vehicle Guidance are important issues. Automobile manufacturers view automatic driving as a very interesting product with motivating key features which allow improvement of the car safety, reduction in emission or fuel consumption or optimization of driver comfort during long journeys. Car racing is an active research field where new advances in aerodynamics, consumption and engine power are critical each season. Our proposal is to research how evolutionary computation techniques can help in this field. For this work we have designed an automatic controller that learns rules with a genetic algorithm. This paper is a report of the results obtained by this controller during the car racing competition held in Hong Kong during the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2008).Publicad

Building Green

Building Green explores the experience of environmental architects in Mumbai, one of the world’s most populous and population-dense urban areas and a city iconic for its massive informal settlements, extreme wealth asymmetries, and ecological stresses. Under these conditions, what does it mean to learn, and try to practice, so-called green design? By tracing the training and professional experiences of environmental architects in India’s first graduate degree program in Environmental Architecture, Rademacher shows how environmental architects forged sustainability concepts and practices and sought to make them meaningful through engaged architectural practice. The book’s focus on practitioners offers insights into the many roles that converge to produce this emergent, critically important form of urban expertise. At once activists, scientists, and designers, the environmental architects profiled in Building Green act as key agents of urban change whose efforts in practice are shaped by a complex urban development economy, layered political power relations, and a calculus of when, and how, their expert skills might be operationalized in service of a global urban future

Building Green

Building Green explores the experience of environmental architects in Mumbai, one of the world’s most populous and population-dense urban areas and a city iconic for its massive informal settlements, extreme wealth asymmetries, and ecological stresses. Under these conditions, what does it mean to learn, and try to practice, so-called green design? By tracing the training and professional experiences of environmental architects in India’s first graduate degree program in Environmental Architecture, Rademacher shows how environmental architects forged sustainability concepts and practices and sought to make them meaningful through engaged architectural practice. The book’s focus on practitioners offers insights into the many roles that converge to produce this emergent, critically important form of urban expertise. At once activists, scientists, and designers, the environmental architects profiled in Building Green act as key agents of urban change whose efforts in practice are shaped by a complex urban development economy, layered political power relations, and a calculus of when, and how, their expert skills might be operationalized in service of a global urban future