The Impact of Morphological Diversity in Robot Swarms

Mkhatshwa, S. and Nitschke, G. (2023) The Impact of Morphological Diversity in Robot Swarms, Proceedings of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2023), 15-19 July 2023, Lisbon, Portugal, ACM.

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Abstract

In nature, morphological diversity enhances functional diversity, however, there is little swarm (collective) robotics research on the impact of morphological and behavioral (body-brain) diversity that emerges in response to changing environments. This study investigates the impact of increasingly complex task environments on the artificial evolution of body-brain diversity in simulated robot swarms. We investigate whether increasing task environment complexity (collective behavior tasks requiring increasing degrees of cooperative behavior) mandates concurrent increases in behavioral, morphological, or coupled increases in body-brain diversity in robotic swarms. Experiments compared three variants of collective behavior evolution across increasingly complex task environments: two behavioral diversity maintenance variants and body-brain diversity maintenance. Results indicate that body-brain diversity maintenance yielded a significantly higher behavioral and morphological diversity in evolved swarms overall, which was beneficial in the most complex task environment.

Item Type:	Conference paper
Subjects:	Computing methodologies > Artificial intelligence
Date Deposited:	09 Nov 2023 09:35
Last Modified:	09 Nov 2023 09:35
URI:	https://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/1593

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