scholarly journals Empirical assessment and comparison of neuro-evolutionary methods for the automatic off-line design of robot swarms

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Hasselmann ◽  
Antoine Ligot ◽  
Julian Ruddick ◽  
Mauro Birattari

AbstractNeuro-evolution is an appealing approach to generating collective behaviors for robot swarms. In its typical application, known as off-line automatic design, the neural networks controlling the robots are optimized in simulation. It is understood that the so-called reality gap, the unavoidable differences between simulation and reality, typically causes neural network to be less effective on real robots than what is predicted by simulation. In this paper, we present an empirical study on the extent to which the reality gap impacts the most popular and advanced neuro-evolutionary methods for the off-line design of robot swarms. The results show that the neural networks produced by the methods under analysis performed well in simulation, but not in real-robot experiments. Further, the ranking that could be observed in simulation between the methods eventually disappeared. We find compelling evidence that real-robot experiments are needed to reliably assess the performance of neuro-evolutionary methods and that the robustness to the reality gap is the main issue to be addressed to advance the application of neuro-evolution to robot swarms.

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. e291
Author(s):  
Ken Hasselmann ◽  
Mauro Birattari

We investigate the automatic design of communication in swarm robotics through two studies. We first introduce Gianduja an automatic design method that generates collective behaviors for robot swarms in which individuals can locally exchange a message whose semantics is not a priori fixed. It is the automatic design process that, on a per-mission basis, defines the conditions under which the message is sent and the effect that it has on the receiving peers. Then, we extend Gianduja to Gianduja2 and Gianduja 3, which target robots that can exchange multiple distinct messages. Also in this case, the semantics of the messages is automatically defined on a per-mission basis by the design process. Gianduja and its variants are based on Chocolate, which does not provide any support for local communication. In the article, we compare Gianduja and its variants with a standard neuro-evolutionary approach. We consider a total of six different swarm robotics missions. We present results based on simulation and tests performed with 20 e-puck robots. Results show that, typically, Gianduja and its variants are able to associate a meaningful semantics to messages.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (13) ◽  
pp. 4654 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Garzón Ramos ◽  
Mauro Birattari

Research in swarm robotics has shown that automatic design is an effective approach to realize robot swarms. In automatic design methods, the collective behavior of a swarm is obtained by automatically configuring and fine-tuning the control software of individual robots. In this paper, we present TuttiFrutti: an automatic design method for robot swarms that belongs to AutoMoDe—a family of methods that produce control software by assembling preexisting software modules via optimization. The peculiarity of TuttiFrutti is that it designs control software for e-puck robots that can display and perceive colors using their RGB LEDs and omnidirectional camera. Studies with AutoMoDe have been so far restricted by the limited capabilities of the e-pucks. By enabling the use of colors, we significantly enlarge the variety of collective behaviors they can produce. We assess TuttiFrutti with swarms of e-pucks that perform missions in which they should react to colored light. Results show that TuttiFrutti designs collective behaviors in which the robots identify the colored light displayed in the environment and act accordingly. The control software designed by TuttiFrutti endowed the swarms of e-pucks with the ability to use color-based information for handling events, communicating, and navigating.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 86 ◽  
Author(s):  
César Pérez López ◽  
María Delgado Rodríguez ◽  
Sonia de Lucas Santos

The goal of the present research is to contribute to the detection of tax fraud concerning personal income tax returns (IRPF, in Spanish) filed in Spain, through the use of Machine Learning advanced predictive tools, by applying Multilayer Perceptron neural network (MLP) models. The possibilities springing from these techniques have been applied to a broad range of personal income return data supplied by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IEF). The use of the neural networks enabled taxpayer segmentation as well as calculation of the probability concerning an individual taxpayer’s propensity to attempt to evade taxes. The results showed that the selected model has an efficiency rate of 84.3%, implying an improvement in relation to other models utilized in tax fraud detection. The proposal can be generalized to quantify an individual’s propensity to commit fraud with regards to other kinds of taxes. These models will support tax offices to help them arrive at the best decisions regarding action plans to combat tax fraud.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Jian Zheng ◽  
Jianfeng Wang ◽  
Yanping Chen ◽  
Shuping Chen ◽  
Jingjin Chen ◽  
...  

Neural networks can approximate data because of owning many compact non-linear layers. In high-dimensional space, due to the curse of dimensionality, data distribution becomes sparse, causing that it is difficulty to provide sufficient information. Hence, the task becomes even harder if neural networks approximate data in high-dimensional space. To address this issue, according to the Lipschitz condition, the two deviations, i.e., the deviation of the neural networks trained using high-dimensional functions, and the deviation of high-dimensional functions approximation data, are derived. This purpose of doing this is to improve the ability of approximation high-dimensional space using neural networks. Experimental results show that the neural networks trained using high-dimensional functions outperforms that of using data in the capability of approximation data in high-dimensional space. We find that the neural networks trained using high-dimensional functions more suitable for high-dimensional space than that of using data, so that there is no need to retain sufficient data for neural networks training. Our findings suggests that in high-dimensional space, by tuning hidden layers of neural networks, this is hard to have substantial positive effects on improving precision of approximation data.


2011 ◽  
Vol 464 ◽  
pp. 38-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ping Ye ◽  
Gui Rong Weng

This paper proposed a novel method for leaf classification and recognition. In the method, the moment invariant and fractal dimension were regarded as the characteristic parameters of the plant leaf. In order to extract the representative characteristic parameters, pretreatment of the leaf images, including RGB-gray converting, image binarization and leafstalk removing. The extracted leaf characteristic parameters were further utilized as training sets to train the neural networks. The proposed method was proved effectively to reach a recognition rate about 92% for most of the testing leaf samples


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Domonkos Haffner ◽  
Ferenc Izsák

The localization of multiple scattering objects is performed while using scattered waves. An up-to-date approach: neural networks are used to estimate the corresponding locations. In the scattering phenomenon under investigation, we assume known incident plane waves, fully reflecting balls with known diameters and measurement data of the scattered wave on one fixed segment. The training data are constructed while using the simulation package μ-diff in Matlab. The structure of the neural networks, which are widely used for similar purposes, is further developed. A complex locally connected layer is the main compound of the proposed setup. With this and an appropriate preprocessing of the training data set, the number of parameters can be kept at a relatively low level. As a result, using a relatively large training data set, the unknown locations of the objects can be estimated effectively.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 6194
Author(s):  
Selma Tchoketch_Kebir ◽  
Nawal Cheggaga ◽  
Adrian Ilinca ◽  
Sabri Boulouma

This paper presents an efficient neural network-based method for fault diagnosis in photovoltaic arrays. The proposed method was elaborated on three main steps: the data-feeding step, the fault-modeling step, and the decision step. The first step consists of feeding the real meteorological and electrical data to the neural networks, namely solar irradiance, panel temperature, photovoltaic-current, and photovoltaic-voltage. The second step consists of modeling a healthy mode of operation and five additional faulty operational modes; the modeling process is carried out using two networks of artificial neural networks. From this step, six classes are obtained, where each class corresponds to a predefined model, namely, the faultless scenario and five faulty scenarios. The third step involves the diagnosis decision about the system’s state. Based on the results from the above step, two probabilistic neural networks will classify each generated data according to the six classes. The obtained results show that the developed method can effectively detect different types of faults and classify them. Besides, this method still achieves high performances even in the presence of noises. It provides a diagnosis even in the presence of data injected at reduced real-time, which proves its robustness.


Complexity ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lijun Song ◽  
Zhongxing Duan ◽  
Bo He ◽  
Zhe Li

The centralized Kalman filter is always applied in the velocity and attitude matching of Transfer Alignment (TA). But the centralized Kalman has many disadvantages, such as large amount of calculation, poor real-time performance, and low reliability. In the paper, the federal Kalman filter (FKF) based on neural networks is used in the velocity and attitude matching of TA, the Kalman filter is adjusted by the neural networks in the two subfilters, the federal filter is used to fuse the information of the two subfilters, and the global suboptimal state estimation is obtained. The result of simulation shows that the federal Kalman filter based on neural networks is better in estimating the initial attitude misalignment angle of inertial navigation system (INS) when the system dynamic model and noise statistics characteristics of inertial navigation system are unclear, and the estimation error is smaller and the accuracy is higher.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document