Incremental Robot Shaping

Incremental Robot Shaping I Title : Incremental Robot

We propose a modular architecture for autonomous robots which allows for the implementation of basic behavioral modules by both programming and training, and accommodates for an evolutionary development of the interconnections among modules. This architecture can implement highly complex controllers and allows for incremental shaping of the robot behavior. Our proposal is exempli ed and evaluat...

Incremental Robot Shaping

Evolving Monolithic Robot Controllers Through Incremental Shaping

Evolutionary robotics has been shown to be an effective technique for generating robot behaviors that are difficult to derive analytically from the robot’s mechanics and task environment. Moreover, augmenting evolutionary algorithms with environmental scaffolding via an incremental shaping method makes it possible to evolve controllers for complex tasks that would otherwise be infeasible. In th...

Robot Shaping: the Hamster Experiment

In this paper we present an example of the application of a technique, which we call robot shaping, to designing and building learning autonomous robots. Our autonomous robot (called HAMSTER1) is a multi-sensor mobile robot that performs the task of collecting “food” and bringing it to its “nest”. Its control architecture is based on the behavioral paradigm. The behavioral modules are implement...

Robot training through incremental learning

The real world is too complex and variable to directly program an autonomous ground robot’s control system to respond to the inputs from its environmental sensors such as LIDAR and video. The need for learning incrementally, discarding prior data, is important because of the vast amount of data that can be generated by these sensors. This is crucial because the system needs to generate and upda...