Online Evolution for Cooperative Behavior in Group Robot Systems

In distributed mobile robot systems, autonomous robots accomplish complicated tasks through intelligent cooperation with each other. This paper presents behavior learning and online distributed evolution for cooperative behavior of a group of autonomous robots. Learning and evolution capabilities are essential for a group of autonomous robots to adapt to unstructured environments. Behavior learning finds an optimal state-action mapping of a robot for a given operating condition. In behavior learning, a Q-learning algorithm is modified to handle delayed rewards in the distributed robot systems. A group of robots implements cooperative behaviors through communication with other robots. Individual robots improve the state-action mapping through online evolution with the crossover operator based on the Q-values and their update frequencies. A cooperative material search problem demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed behavior learning and online distributed evolution method for implementing cooperative behavior of a group of autonomous mobile robots.