Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

A Hierarchical Approach to Evolving Behaviour-Trees for Swarm Control

Montague, Kirsty; Hart, Emma; Paechter, Ben

Authors



Contributors

Stephen Smith
Editor

João Correia
Editor

Christian Cintrano
Editor

Abstract

Behaviour trees (BTs) are commonly used as controllers in robotic swarms due their modular composition and to the fact that they can be easily interpreted by humans. From an algorithmic perspective, an additional advantage is that extra modules can easily be introduced and incorporated into new trees. Genetic Programming (GP) has already been shown to be capable of evolving BTs to achieve a variety of sub-tasks (primitives) of a higher-level goal. In this work we show that a hierarchical controller can be evolved that first uses GP to evolve a repertoire of primitives expressed as BTs, and then to evolve a high-level BT controller that leverages the evolved repertoire for a foraging task. We show that the hierarchical approach that uses BTs at two levels outperforms a baseline in which the BTs are evolved using only low-level nodes. In addition, we propose a method to improve the quality of the primitive repertoire, which in turn results in improved high-level BTs.

Citation

Montague, K., Hart, E., & Paechter, B. (2024, April). A Hierarchical Approach to Evolving Behaviour-Trees for Swarm Control. Presented at EvoStar 2024, Aberystwyth

Presentation Conference Type Conference Paper (Published)
Conference Name EvoStar 2024
Start Date Apr 3, 2024
End Date Apr 5, 2024
Acceptance Date Jan 10, 2024
Online Publication Date Mar 21, 2024
Publication Date 2024
Deposit Date Feb 7, 2024
Publicly Available Date Mar 22, 2025
Publisher Springer
Pages 178-193
Series Title Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)
Series Number 14634
Series ISSN 0302-9743
Book Title Applications of Evolutionary Computation: 27th European Conference, EvoApplications 2024, Held as Part of EvoStar 2024, Aberystwyth, UK, April 3–5, 2024, Proceedings, Part I
ISBN 9783031568510
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56852-7_12
Public URL http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/3504046

Files

This file is under embargo until Mar 22, 2025 due to copyright reasons.

Contact repository@napier.ac.uk to request a copy for personal use.







You might also like



Downloadable Citations