Studying Parallel Evolutionary Algorithms: The cellular Programming Case

Parallel evolutionary algorithms, studied to some extent over the past few years, have proven empirically worthwhile—though there seems to be lacking a better understanding of their workings. In this paper we concentrate on cellular (fine-grained) models, presenting a number of statistical measures, both at the genotypic and phenotypic levels. We demonstrate the application and utility of these measures on a specific example, that of the cellular programming evolutionary algorithm, when used to evolve solutions to a hard problem in the cellular-automata domain, known as synchronization

Onboard Evolution of Understandable Swarm Behaviors

Designing the individual robot rules that give rise to desired emergent swarm behaviors is difficult. The common method of running evolutionary algorithms off‐line to automatically discover controllers in simulation suffers from two disadvantages: the generation of controllers is not situated in the swarm and so cannot be performed in the wild, and the evolved controllers are often opaque and hard to understand. A swarm of robots with considerable on‐board processing power is used to move the evolutionary process into the swarm, providing a potential route to continuously generating swarm behaviors adapted to the environments and tasks at hand. By making the evolved controllers human‐understandable using behavior trees, the controllers can be queried, explained, and even improved by a human user. A swarm system capable of evolving and executing fit controllers entirely onboard physical robots in less than 15 min is demonstrated. One of the evolved controllers is then analyzed to explain its functionality. With the insights gained, a significant performance improvement in the evolved controller is engineered

A service oriented architecture for decision making in engineering design

Decision making in engineering design can be effectively addressed by using genetic algorithms to solve multi-objective problems. These multi-objective genetic algorithms (MOGAs) are well suited to implementation in a Service Oriented Architecture. Often the evaluation process of the MOGA is compute-intensive due to the use of a complex computer model to represent the real-world system. The emerging paradigm of Grid Computing offers a potential solution to the compute-intensive nature of this objective function evaluation, by allowing access to large amounts of compute resources in a distributed manner. This paper presents a grid-enabled framework for multi-objective optimisation using genetic algorithms (MOGA-G) to aid decision making in engineering design

Multi-objective evolutionary design of robust controllers on the grid

The emerging paradigm of grid computing provides a powerful platform for the solution of complex and computationally expensive problems. An example of this is the multi-objective evolutionary design of robust controllers, where each candidate controller design has to be synthesised and the resulting performance of the compensated system evaluated by computer simulation. This paper introduces a grid-enabled framework for the multi-objective optimisation of computationally expensive problems, before using the framework in the multi-objective evolutionary design of a robust lateral stability controller for a real-world aircraft using H-infinity loop shaping

USO DEL RODILLO AIREADOR EN LA RESTAURACIÓN DE PASTIZALES EN AGUA PRIETA, SONORA

La desertificación de pastizales en ecosistemas áridos y semiáridos al norte de México es el resultado de siglos de sobrepastoreo y sobreexplotación de recursos naturales, que redujeron la cobertura vegetal y provocaron erosión eólica e hídrica; compactación de suelo e invasión de especies arbustivas y pastos exóticos. Las herramientas comúnmente utilizadas para la restauración de pastizales son las quemas prescritas, el tratamiento con químicos para controlar la invasión de arbustos y el rodillo aireador. Este último descompacta el suelo, permitiendo el intercambio gaseoso, la infiltración de agua y semillas, además de que aplasta los arbustos. La evaluación de los efectos del rodillo con siembra de pastos nativos en Cuenca los Ojos A.C., en el Municipio de Agua Prieta, Sonora, se realizó mediante la medición de cobertura vegetal de sitios tratados y no tratados, a través de líneas de Canfield. Los muestreos se realizaron entre marzo y mayo del 2015. Los resultados mostraron que los pastos y hierbas anuales en zonas aireadas y sembradas se establecieron con éxito. El aireado redujo la cobertura vegetal de arbustivas, que en las zonas sin tratar, componen principalmente las comunidades vegetales

Human Action Recognition Based on Temporal Pyramid of Key Poses Using RGB-D Sensors

Human action recognition is a hot research topic in computer vision, mainly due to the high number of related applications, such as surveillance, human computer interaction, or assisted living. Low cost RGB-D sensors have been extensively used in this field. They can provide skeleton joints, which represent a compact and effective representation of the human posture. This work proposes an algorithm for human action recognition where the features are computed from skeleton joints. A sequence of skeleton features is represented as a set of key poses, from which histograms are extracted. The temporal structure of the sequence is kept using a temporal pyramid of key poses. Finally, a multi-class SVM performs the classification task. The algorithm optimization through evolutionary computation allows to reach results comparable to the state-of-the-art on the MSR Action3D dataset.This work was supported by a STSM Grant from COST Action IC1303 AAPELE - Architectures, Algorithms and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments

A new initialization procedure for the distributed estimation of distribution algorithms

Estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs) are one of the most promising paradigms in today’s evolutionary computation. In this field, there has been an incipient activity in the so-called parallel estimation of distribution algorithms (pEDAs). One of these approaches is the distributed estimation of distribution algorithms (dEDAs). This paper introduces a new initialization mechanism for each of the populations of the islands based on the Voronoi cells. To analyze the results, a series of different experiments using the benchmark suite for the special session on Real-parameter Optimization of the IEEE CEC 2005 conference has been carried out. The results obtained suggest that the Voronoi initialization method considerably improves the performance obtained from a traditional uniform initialization