O -line Evolution for a Robot Navigation System based on a Gate-Level Evolvable Hardware

Recently there has been a great interest in the design and study of evolvable systems based on Arti cial Life principles in order to control the behavior of physically embedded systems such as a mobile robot. This paper studies an evolutionary navigation system for a mobile robot using a Boolean function approach implemented on gatelevel evolvable hardware (EHW). The task of the mobile robot is to reach a goal represented by a colored light while avoiding obstacles during its motion. Using the evolution principles to build the desired behaviors, we show that the Boolean function approach using gate-level evolvable hardware is su cient. We demonstrate the e ectiveness of the generalization ability of EHW by generating o -line the robot behavior. The results show that the evolvable hardware system is able to obtain the desired behaviors and to generate a robust robot behavior insensitive to the gap between the real and simulated world.