Evolving Symbolic Controllers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a symbolic controller evolution approach that combines manual behavior design with evolutionary assembly, demonstrating efficiency, recursiveness, and robustness in complex task solving.

Contribution

It presents a novel method for evolving symbolic controllers by assembling elementary behaviors, bridging manual design and evolutionary automation.

Findings

Efficient assembly of behaviors for complex tasks

High robustness and generalization of evolved controllers

Recursiveness of the symbolic controller approach

Abstract

The idea of symbolic controllers tries to bridge the gap between the top-down manual design of the controller architecture, as advocated in Brooks' subsumption architecture, and the bottom-up designer-free approach that is now standard within the Evolutionary Robotics community. The designer provides a set of elementary behavior, and evolution is given the goal of assembling them to solve complex tasks. Two experiments are presented, demonstrating the efficiency and showing the recursiveness of this approach. In particular, the sensitivity with respect to the proposed elementary behaviors, and the robustness w.r.t. generalization of the resulting controllers are studied in detail.