5 CONCLUSIONS
We presented in this paper some experiments based
on the grasping task (for example an autonomous
vacuum robot). These experiments are based on the
genetic evolution of a neurocontroller without
hidden layer. In the first part we evolved in
simulation eight neurocontrollers (each in a given
environment). The neurocontroller were swapped
and the performances in the other environments
were evaluated. For some researchers, there is
sometime a mix-up between the genetic algorithm
and the generated behavior. We’ve shown that
genetics algorithms can be easily adapted with the
same parameters to several problems. We’ve also
shown that the generated neurocontroller is
dedicated to the trained environment. It means that
genetics algorithms are generic, contrary to
neurocontrollers that are dedicated. This result can
probably be extended to all the parameters of the
evaluation: noise, robot’s hardware, battery charge,
etc.
In the second part of the paper, several strategies
were experimented to produce generic
neurocontrollers. First, the evaluation of the
individual was done in the eight environments and
the average performance was used for the fitness
computation. This experiment provides good results
except in one environment where the fitness was
very poor. In the final experiment the performance
in the worst environment was used to compute the
fitness. The global performance is slightly smaller
than in the previous experiment, but the performance
is more distributed in the environments. Generating
generic controllers using genetic algorithms stay a
complex problem but we’ve shown that taking the
worst case for evaluating the individual may be a
first step in the automatic generation of generic
neurocontrollers.
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