Evolutionary robotics : anticipation and the reality gap

Evolutionary Robotics provide efficient tools and approach to address automatic design of controllers for automous mobile robots. However, the computational cost of the optimization process makes it difficult to evolve controllers directly into the real world. This paper addresses the key problem of tranferring into the real world a robotic controller that has been evolved in a robotic simulator. The approach presented here relies on the definition of an anticipation-enabled control architecture. The anticipation module is able to build a partial model of the simulated environment and, once in the real world, performs an error estimation of this model. This error can be reused so as to perform in-situ on-line adaptation of robot control. Experiments in simulation and real-world showed that an evolved robot is able to perform on-line recovery from several kind of locomotion perturbations

Using Echo State Networks for Robot Navigation Behavior Acquisition

International audienceRobot Behavior Learning by Demonstration deals with the ability for a robot to learn a behavior from one or several demonstrations provided by a human teacher, possibly through tele-operation or imitation. This implies controllers that can address both (1) the feature selection problem related to a great amount of mostly irrelevant sensory data and (2) dealing with temporal sequences of demonstrations. Echo State Networks have been proposed recently for time series prediction and have been shown to perform remarkably well on this kind of data. In this paper, we introduce ESN to robot behavior acquisition in the scope of a mobile robot performing navigation tasks. ESN actually show comparable and even better performance with that of other algorithms from the literature in similar experimental conditions. Moreover, some properties regarding dynamics of ESN in the context of learning by demonstration are investigated

Memory-Enhanced Evolutionary Robotics: The Echo State Network Approach

International audienceInterested in Evolutionary Robotics, this paper focuses on the acquisition and exploitation of memory skills. The targeted task is a well-studied benchmark problem, the Tolman maze, requiring in principle the robotic controller to feature some (limited) counting abilities. An elaborate experimental setting is used to enforce the controller generality and prevent opportunistic evolution from mimicking deliberative skills through smart reactive heuristics. The paper compares the prominent NEAT approach, achieving the non-parametric optimization of Neural Nets, with the evolutionary optimization of Echo State Networks, pertaining to the recent field of Reservoir Computing. While both search spaces offer a sufficient expressivity and enable the modelling of complex dynamic systems, the latter one is amenable to robust parametric, linear optimization with Covariance Matrix Adaptation-Evolution Strategies

Change Point Detection and Meta-Bandits for Online Learning in Dynamic Environments

National audienceMotivated by realtime website optimization, this paper is about online learning in abruptly changing environments. Two extensions of the UCBT algorithm are combined in order to handle dynamic multi-armed bandits, and specifically to cope with fast variations in the rewards. Firstly, a change point detection test based on Page-Hinkley statistics is used to overcome the limitations due to the UCBT inertia. Secondly, a controlled forgetting strategy dubbed Meta-Bandit is proposed to take care of the Exploration vs Exploitation trade-off when the PH test is triggered. Extensive empirical validation shows significant improvements compared to the baseline algorithms. The paper also investigates the sensitivity of the proposed algorithm with respect to the number of available options

Memory-Enhanced Evolutionary Robotics: The Echo State Network Approach

International audienceInterested in Evolutionary Robotics, this paper focuses on the acquisition and exploitation of memory skills. The targeted task is a well-studied benchmark problem, the Tolman maze, requiring in principle the robotic controller to feature some (limited) counting abilities. An elaborate experimental setting is used to enforce the controller generality and prevent opportunistic evolution from mimicking deliberative skills through smart reactive heuristics. The paper compares the prominent NEAT approach, achieving the non-parametric optimization of Neural Nets, with the evolutionary optimization of Echo State Networks, pertaining to the recent field of Reservoir Computing. While both search spaces offer a sufficient expressivity and enable the modelling of complex dynamic systems, the latter one is amenable to robust parametric, linear optimization with Covariance Matrix Adaptation-Evolution Strategies

Change Point Detection and Meta-Bandits for Online Learning in Dynamic Environments

National audienceMotivated by realtime website optimization, this paper is about online learning in abruptly changing environments. Two extensions of the UCBT algorithm are combined in order to handle dynamic multi-armed bandits, and specifically to cope with fast variations in the rewards. Firstly, a change point detection test based on Page-Hinkley statistics is used to overcome the limitations due to the UCBT inertia. Secondly, a controlled forgetting strategy dubbed Meta-Bandit is proposed to take care of the Exploration vs Exploitation trade-off when the PH test is triggered. Extensive empirical validation shows significant improvements compared to the baseline algorithms. The paper also investigates the sensitivity of the proposed algorithm with respect to the number of available options

Multi-armed Bandit, Dynamic Environments and Meta-Bandits

This paper presents the Adapt-EvE algorithm, extending the UCBT online learning algorithm (Auer et al. 2002) to abruptly changing environments. Adapt-EvE features an adaptive change-point detection test based on Page-Hinkley statistics, and two alternative xtra-exploration procedures respectively based on smooth-restart and Meta-Bandits