abstract = "In this paper we propose GESwarm, a novel tool that
can automatically synthesise collective behaviours for
swarms of autonomous robots through evolutionary
robotics. Evolutionary robotics typically relies on
artificial evolution for tuning the weights of an
artificial neural network that is then used as
individual behaviour representation. The main caveat of
neural networks is that they are very difficult to
reverse engineer, meaning that once a suitable solution
is found, it is very difficult to analyse, to modify,
and to tease apart the inherent principles that lead to
the desired collective behaviour. In contrast, our
representation is based on completely readable and
analysable individual-level rules that lead to a
desired collective behaviour.
The core of our method is a grammar that can generate a
rich variety of collective behaviours. We test GESwarm
by evolving a foraging strategy using a realistic swarm
robotics simulator. We then systematically compare the
evolved collective behaviour against an hand-coded one
for performance, scalability and flexibility, showing
that collective behaviours evolved with GESwarm can
outperform the hand-coded one.",