Individual, Social and Evolutionary Adaptation in Collective Systems

Advanced autonomous robotsmay someday be required to negotiate environments and situations that their designers had not anticipated. The future designers of these robots may not have adequate expertise to provide appropriate control algorithms in the case that an unforeseen situation is encountered in a remote environment in which a robot cannot be accessed. It is not always practical or even possible to define every aspect of an autonomous robot’s environment, or to give a tractable dynamical systems-level description of the task the robot is to perform. The robot must have the ability to learn control without human supervision.