Embodied Evolution in Collective Robotics: A Review
It synthesizes research trends for robotics researchers, but is incremental as a review paper.
The paper reviews embodied evolution techniques for collective robotics, tracing the shift from parallel search in small groups to distributed learning for swarm behaviors from 1999 to 2017.
This paper provides an overview of evolutionary robotics techniques applied to on-line distributed evolution for robot collectives -- namely, embodied evolution. It provides a definition of embodied evolution as well as a thorough description of the underlying concepts and mechanisms. The paper also presents a comprehensive summary of research published in the field since its inception (1999-2017), providing various perspectives to identify the major trends. In particular, we identify a shift from considering embodied evolution as a parallel search method within small robot collectives (fewer than 10 robots) to embodied evolution as an on-line distributed learning method for designing collective behaviours in swarm-like collectives. The paper concludes with a discussion of applications and open questions, providing a milestone for past and an inspiration for future research.