Masters Theses

Author

Vikram Aedula

Abstract

"While considerable progress has been made in recent years toward the development of multirobot teams, much work remains to be done before these teams are used widely in real-world applications. In many real-world problems robots have to move from an initial starting position to the specified location. This thesis proposes to construct an artificial system with autonomous Khepera robots capable of achieving simple collective task by traversing in an unpredictable environment. Robotic agents would be deployed to collectively move to a known area, which is the destination. This could be called collective locomotion. An interesting question is how can such behavior best be evolved? Neural network(s) that act as brain(s) control the robots and these brain(s) evolve interacting with the environment. A powerful method is to coevolve them in separate subpopulations, and test together in the common task.

An attempt is made to model a team of robots collectively moving towards a specified goal; a method called Enforced Subpopulation (ESP) is used. Autonomous agents (robots) and artificial life are typically said to 'learn', 'develop' and 'evolve' in interaction with their environments.

The results of the experiments performed in this work show that coevolution of the robots is necessary for such a task and autonomous control of the robots is more efficient and robust than central control. By implementing neural networks for collective locomotion, this thesis demonstrates the application of evolutionary algorithms in developing evolutionary robotic systems and generating neural networks for collective locomotion. Such a method could potentially be used for evolving neural networks for variety of behaviors in robots"--Abstract, page iii.

Advisor(s)

Dagli, Cihan H., 1949-

Committee Member(s)

St. Clair, Daniel C.
Enke, David Lee, 1965-

Department(s)

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering

Degree Name

M.S. in Engineering Management

Publisher

University of Missouri--Rolla

Publication Date

Spring 2003

Pagination

ix, 68 pages

Note about bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 65-67)

Rights

© 2003 Vikram Aedula, All rights reserved.

Document Type

Thesis - Restricted Access

File Type

text

Language

English

Subject Headings

Robots -- Control systemsRobots -- MotionNeural networks (Computer science)

Thesis Number

T 8201

Print OCLC #

53149934

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