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Crossing the reality gap in evolutionary robotics by promoting transferable controllers

Published: 07 July 2010 Publication History

Abstract

The reality gap, that often makes controllers evolved in simulation inefficient once transferred onto the real system, remains a critical issue in Evolutionary Robotics (ER); it prevents ER application to real-world problems. We hypothesize that this gap mainly stems from a conflict between the efficiency of the solutions in simulation and their transferability from simulation to reality: best solutions in simulation often rely on bad simulated phenomena (e.g. the most dynamic ones). This hypothesis leads to a multi-objective formulation of ER in which two main objectives are optimized via a Pareto-based Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm: (1) the fitness and (2) the transferability. To evaluate this second objective, a simulation-to-reality disparity value is approximated for each controller. The proposed method is applied to the evolution of walking controllers for a real 8-DOF quadrupedal robot. It successfully finds efficient and well-transferable controllers with only a few experiments in reality.

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cover image ACM Conferences
GECCO '10: Proceedings of the 12th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
July 2010
1520 pages
ISBN:9781450300728
DOI:10.1145/1830483
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 July 2010

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Author Tags

  1. evolutionary robotics
  2. multiobjective optimization
  3. reality gap problem
  4. simulation-to-reality disparity

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Reinforcement learning for freeform robot design2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)10.1109/ICRA57147.2024.10610048(8799-8806)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
  • (2024)Examining the simulation-to-reality gap of a wheel loader digging in deformable terrainMultibody System Dynamics10.1007/s11044-024-10005-5Online publication date: 19-Jul-2024
  • (2024)A Novel Framework for Adaptive Quadruped Robot Locomotion Learning in Uncertain EnvironmentsGreen, Pervasive, and Cloud Computing10.1007/978-981-99-9896-8_10(139-154)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2024
  • (2024)Energy-Based Policy Constraint for Offline Reinforcement LearningArtificial Intelligence10.1007/978-981-99-9119-8_30(335-346)Online publication date: 3-Feb-2024
  • (2023)Deformable Morphing and Multivariable Stiffness in the Evolutionary RoboticsInternational Journal of Automotive Manufacturing and Materials10.53941/ijamm.2023.100013(1)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Adaptive Control Strategy for Quadruped Robots in Actuator Degradation ScenariosProceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Distributed Artificial Intelligence10.1145/3627676.3627686(1-13)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Promoting Transfer of Robot Neuro-Motion-Controllers by Many-Objective Topology and Weight EvolutionIEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation10.1109/TEVC.2022.317229427:2(385-395)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
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  • (2023)Self-supervised Cloth Reconstruction via Action-conditioned Cloth Tracking2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)10.1109/ICRA48891.2023.10160653(7111-7118)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
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