Evolving Collective Behaviors in Robotics

Workshop at GECCO 2015 - July 12-15, 2015 - Madrid, Spain



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This page is about the ECBR workshop at GECCO 2015
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Organizers: Abraham Prieto, Evert Haasdijk, Nicolas Bredeche
Contact: evocobots@isir.upmc.fr
Web: http://evocobots.isir.upmc.fr

Description

This workshop brings together researchers interested in the automatic design of coordinated behaviors in decentralized collective systems, putting the emphasis on evolutionary robotics techniques. The goal of this workshop is to provide an updated perspective of this field, both from a theoretical and practical perspective, and to consider different areas of applicability for such techniques including design for engineering and modelling for biology. Moreover, this workshop will encourage collaboration between researchers already present at GECCO, or in other similar venues such as the Artificial Life conferences, which are not always present at the same conference.

When/where?

July 11-15, 2015, at GECCO 2015, the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Madrid, Spain.

Program

  • Two keynote talks (40 min each, invitation-based)
  • Presentations of on-going or published work (20 min each, submission-based)
Session 1 Sunday, July 12, 14:30-16:20, Patio 1
  • Keynote: Evolution of Collective Behaviors by Minimizing Surprisal and by Micro-Macro Links (Heiko Hamann)
  • The Cost of Communication: Environmental Pressure and Survivability in mEDEA (Andreas Steyven, Emma Hart, Ben Paechter)
  • Embodied Evolution for Collective Indoor Surveillance and Location (Pedro Trueba, Abraham Prieto, Francisco Bellas, Richard J. Duro)
  • Collective sharing of knowledge in a DREAM (Jacqueline Heinerman)
  • Evolving Diverse Collective Behaviors Independent of Swarm Density (Payam Zahadat, Heiko Hamann, Thomas Schmickl)
Session 2 Sunday, July 12, 16:40-18:30, Patio 1
  • Keynote: Co-evolving Morphology and Behaviour for Robotic Swarms (Geoff Nitschke)
  • Elements and current state-of-the-art of embodied evolutionary robotics (Nicolas Bredeche, Evert Haasdijk, Abraham Prieto)
  • Simulating Morphological Evolution in Large Robot Populations (Florian Golemo, Marjeta Markovic, Jasper Schoormans, Peter de Jonge, Maik Couwenberg, Evert Haasdijk)
  • Hyb-CCEA: Cooperative Coevolution of Hybrid Teams (Jorge Gomes, Pedro Mariano, Anders Lyhne Christensen)

Bio of the organizers

Abraham Prieto Garcia is an Associate Professor at the University of A Coruña, Spain. He is a member of the Integrated Group for Engineering Research (GII) of the same university and leads the Collective Systems Section within the GII. He graduated in 2002 and obtained his Master Degree in 2004 in Industrial Engineering. In 2009 he obtained a Magna Cum Laude for his PhD Thesis in the field of optimization techniques for distributed problems in engineering. He started his collaboration with the GII in 2004 developing projects related with Intelligent Processing of images and signals and with the optimization of distributed systems. In 2005 he became Assistant Professor and then in 2010 he gained the Associate Professor position. Regarding his research work he is author of several papers in journals, international conferences and book chapters. He has participated in numerous national and regional research projects from public calls, many of them in collaboration with private companies. His research covers the following fields: bio-inspired techniques for distributed problems, evolutionary robotics and image and signal intelligent processing.

Nicolas Bredeche is Professeur des Universites (Professor) at Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC, Paris, France), His research is done in the team Architectures and Models for Adaptation and Cognition, within the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR, CNRS). His field of research is mostly concerned with Evolutionary Computation and Complex Systems (self-adaptive collective robotic systems, generative and developmental systems, evolutionary robotics). In particular, part of his work is about (a) evolutionary design and/or adaptation of group of embodied agents and (b) artificial ontogeny such as multi-cellular developmental systems and self-regulated networks. He is author of more than 30 papers in journals and major conferences in the field. He has (or currently is) advisor or co-advisor of six PhD students and has served in program committees and/or as track chair of the major conferences in the field of Evolutionary Computation (incl. GECCO track chair for the Artificial Life and Robotics track 2012/2013). He is also a member of the french Evolution Artificielle association and has been regularly co-organizing the french Artificial Evolution one-day seminar (JET) since 2009. He has also organized several international workshops in Evolution, Robotics, and Development of Artificial Neural Networks.

Evert Haasdijk is assistant professor in the Computational Intelligence group at VU. He has been with the computational intelligence group at VU since 2008, researching on-line evolution in robots. Before that, he was research assistant at Tilburg University, researching social learning in populations of software agents. Dr Haasdijk has ample experience in evolutionary computation, stretching back to the successful PAPAGENA project in 1992, where he participated as an industry partner. He has served as member of program committees of well-established conferences in the field of evolutionary computation (CEC, GECCO), was local chair for GECCO 2013 and (co-)organised various workshops and track such as the EvoROBOT track at EvoSTAR conferences and the International Workshop on the Evolution of Physical Systems at ECAL and ALIFE conferences. Dr Haasdijk was guest editor for the Special Issue on Evolutionary Robotics of the Evolutionary Intelligence journal and invited speaker at the PPSN XIII Workshop on Nature-Inspired Techniques for Robotics.