Behavior evolution of autonomous mobile robot using genetic programming based on evolvable hardware

This paper presents a genetic programming based evolutionary strategy for on-line adaptive learnable evolvable hardware. Genetic programming can be a useful control method for evolvable hardware for its unique tree structured chromosome. However it is difficult to represent the tree structured chromosome in hardware, and it is difficult to use the crossover operator in hardware. Therefore, genetic programming is not as popular as genetic algorithms in the evolvable hardware community in spite of its possible strengths. We propose a chromosome representation method and a hardware implementation method that can be helpful for this situation. Our method uses a context switchable identical block structure to implement a genetic tree in evolvable hardware. We compose an evolutionary strategy for evolvable hardware by combining the proposed method with other research results. The proposed method is applied to the autonomous mobile robots cooperation problem to verify its usefulness.