Evolving controllers for high-level applications on a service robot: a case study with exhibition visitor flow control

摘要

We investigate the application of simulation-based genetic programming to evolve controllers that perform high-level tasks on a service robot.As a case study, we synthesize a controller for a guide robot that manages the visitor traffic flow in an exhibition space in order to maximize the enjoyment of the visitors.We used genetic programming in a low-fidelity simulation to evolve a controller for this task, which was then transferred to a service robot.An experimental evaluation of the evolved controller in both simulation and on the actual service robot shows that it performs well compared to hand-coded heuristics, and performs comparably to a human operator.