Cooperative Behavior Acquisition in a Multiple Mobile Robot Environment by Co-evolution

Co-evolution has been receiving increased attention as a method for multi agent simultaneous learning. This paper discusses how multiple robots can emerge cooperative behaviors through co-evolutionary processes. As an example task, a simpli ed soccer game with three learning robots is selected and a GP (genetic programming) method is applied to individual population corresponding to each robot so as to obtain cooperative and competitive behaviors through evolutionary processes. The complexity of the problem can be explained twofold: co-evolution for cooperative behaviors needs exact synchronization of mutual evolutions, and three robot co-evolution requires well-complicated environment setups that may gradually change from simpler to more complicated situations so that they can obtain cooperative and competitive behaviors simultaneously in a wide range of search area in various kinds of aspects. Simulation results are shown, and a discussion is given.