Evolutionary Computation in Gene Regulatory Network Research

CHAPTER 13EVOLVING H-GRNS FOR MORPHOGENETIC ADAPTIVE PATTERN FORMATION OF SWARM ROBOTS

Hyondong Oh

Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK

Yaochu Jin

Department of Computing, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

13.1 INTRODUCTION

A swarm robotic system is a multi-robot system consisting of large numbers of autonomous but small-sized simple mobile robots, each having often limited communication and computation capabilities. In recent years, due to the rapid advancements of robotics technology and its inherent attractive features such as cost efficiency, robustness to a single robot failure, and high adaptability, considerable attention has been paid to develop and to efficiently operate these swarm robotic systems. Shape construction and pattern formation using swarm robots are of special interest since they provide a basic functionality to accomplish various collective missions such as search and rescue, environment mapping and monitoring, efficient deployment of sensor networks, and object transportation. Pattern formation in swarm robotic systems is defined as the coordination of a group of robots to maintain a formation with a certain shape of either a predefined pattern or adaptively formed pattern in a self-organized way with the local interaction between robots and with the environment. Swarm pattern formation algorithms have been widely studied, and can be largely divided into four categories: behavior-based control [1,2], leader-follower and virtual structures [3,4], ...