Evolving an agent collective for cooperative mine sweeping

The research goal was to engineer agent collectives that most effectively accomplish a cooperative gathering task. In view of this, we compared reproduction schemes for the artificial evolution of agent controller parameters for a cooperative minesweeping task. Agents utilized cooperative behavior to improve task performance in a simulated environment where different types of mines with different fitness rewards were randomly distributed. We compared the evolution of agent controller parameters with respect to temporal and spatial dimensions of agent reproduction schemes. The first dimension concerned agents reproducing only once at the end of their lifetime or multiple times during their lifetime. The second dimension concerned agents reproducing only with agents in adjacent positions (locally restricted) or with agents located anywhere else in the environment (panmictic). Results indicated that the single reproduction at the end of an agent's lifetime and the locally restricted reproduction schemes afforded the agent collective a higher level of performance in its cooperative gathering task