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All Outputs (40)

Towards a Unified Framework for Software-Hardware Integration in Evolutionary Robotics (2024)
Journal Article
Buchanan, E., Le Goff, L. K., Hale, M. F., Hart, E., Eiben, A. E., De Carlo, M., Angus, M., Woolley, R., Timmis, J., Winfield, A. F., & Tyrrell, A. M. (2024). Towards a Unified Framework for Software-Hardware Integration in Evolutionary Robotics. Robotics, 13(11), Article 157. https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics13110157

The discrepancy between simulated and hardware experiments, the reality gap, is a challenge in evolutionary robotics. While strategies have been proposed to address this gap in fixed-body robots, they are not viable when dealing with populations and... Read More about Towards a Unified Framework for Software-Hardware Integration in Evolutionary Robotics.

Synthesising Diverse and Discriminatory Sets of Instances using Novelty Search in Combinatorial Domains (2024)
Journal Article
Marrero, A., Segredo, E., Leon, C., & Hart, E. (online). Synthesising Diverse and Discriminatory Sets of Instances using Novelty Search in Combinatorial Domains. Evolutionary Computation, https://doi.org/10.1162/evco_a_00350

Gathering sufficient instance data to either train algorithm-selection models or understand algorithm footprints within an instance space can be challenging. We propose an approach to generating synthetic instances that are tailored to perform well w... Read More about Synthesising Diverse and Discriminatory Sets of Instances using Novelty Search in Combinatorial Domains.

Generalized Early Stopping in Evolutionary Direct Policy Search (2024)
Journal Article
Arza, E., Le Goff, L. K., & Hart, E. (2024). Generalized Early Stopping in Evolutionary Direct Policy Search. ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization, 4(3), Article 14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3653024

Lengthy evaluation times are common in many optimization problems such as direct policy search tasks, especially when they involve conducting evaluations in the physical world, e.g. in robotics applications. Often when evaluating solution over a fixe... Read More about Generalized Early Stopping in Evolutionary Direct Policy Search.

Evaluation of Frameworks That Combine Evolution and Learning to Design Robots in Complex Morphological Spaces (2023)
Journal Article
Li, W., Buchanan, E., Goff, L. K. L., Hart, E., Hale, M. F., Wei, B., Carlo, M. D., Angus, M., Woolley, R., Gan, Z., Winfield, A. F., Timmis, J., Eiben, A. E., & Tyrrell, A. M. (2024). Evaluation of Frameworks That Combine Evolution and Learning to Design Robots in Complex Morphological Spaces. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 28(6), 1561 - 1574. https://doi.org/10.1109/tevc.2023.3316363

Jointly optimising both the body and brain of a robot is known to be a challenging task, especially when attempting to evolve designs in simulation that will subsequently be built in the real world. To address this, it is increasingly common to combi... Read More about Evaluation of Frameworks That Combine Evolution and Learning to Design Robots in Complex Morphological Spaces.

Practical Hardware for Evolvable Robots (2023)
Journal Article
Angus, M., Buchanan, E., Le Goff, L. K., Hart, E., Eiben, A., De Carlo, M., Winfield, A. F., Hale, M., Woolley, R., Timmis, J., & Tyrrell, A. M. (2023). Practical Hardware for Evolvable Robots. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 10, Article 1206055. https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2023.1206055

The evolutionary robotics field offers the possibility of autonomously generating robots that are adapted to desired tasks by iteratively optimising across successive generations of robots with varying configurations until a high-performing candidate... Read More about Practical Hardware for Evolvable Robots.

DIGNEA: A tool to generate diverse and discriminatory instance suites for optimisation domains (2023)
Journal Article
Marrero, A., Segredo, E., León, C., & Hart, E. (2023). DIGNEA: A tool to generate diverse and discriminatory instance suites for optimisation domains. SoftwareX, 22, Article 101355. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2023.101355

To advance research in the development of optimisation algorithms, it is crucial to have access to large test-beds of diverse and discriminatory instances from a domain that can highlight strengths and weaknesses of different algorithms. The DIGNEA t... Read More about DIGNEA: A tool to generate diverse and discriminatory instance suites for optimisation domains.

Automated Algorithm Selection: from Feature-Based to Feature-Free Approaches (2023)
Journal Article
Alissa, M., Sim, K., & Hart, E. (2023). Automated Algorithm Selection: from Feature-Based to Feature-Free Approaches. Journal of Heuristics, 29(1), 1-38. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10732-022-09505-4

We propose a novel technique for algorithm-selection, applicable to optimisation domains in which there is implicit sequential information encapsulated in the data, e.g., in online bin-packing. Specifically we train two types of recurrent neural netw... Read More about Automated Algorithm Selection: from Feature-Based to Feature-Free Approaches.

Morpho-evolution with learning using a controller archive as an inheritance mechanism (2022)
Journal Article
Le Goff, L. K., Buchanan, E., Hart, E., Eiben, A. E., Li, W., De Carlo, M., Winfield, A. F., Hale, M. F., Woolley, R., Angus, M., Timmis, J., & Tyrrell, A. M. (2023). Morpho-evolution with learning using a controller archive as an inheritance mechanism. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 15(2), 507-517. https://doi.org/10.1109/tcds.2022.3148543

Most work in evolutionary robotics centres on evolving a controller for a fixed body-plan. However, previous studiessuggest that simultaneously evolving both controller and body-plan could open up many interesting possibilities. However... Read More about Morpho-evolution with learning using a controller archive as an inheritance mechanism.

Artificial evolution of robot bodies and control: on the interaction between evolution, individual and cultural learning (2021)
Journal Article
Hart, E., & Le Goff, L. K. (2022). Artificial evolution of robot bodies and control: on the interaction between evolution, individual and cultural learning. Philosophical Transactions B: Biological Sciences, 377(1843), https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0117

We survey and reflect on evolutionary approaches to the joint optimisation of the body and control of a robot, in scenarios where a the goal is to find a design that maximises performance on a specified task. The review is grounded in a general frame... Read More about Artificial evolution of robot bodies and control: on the interaction between evolution, individual and cultural learning.

Enhancing the practicality of tools to estimate the whole life embodied carbon of building structures via machine-learning models (2021)
Journal Article
Pomponi, F., Luque Anguita, M., Lange, M., D'Amico, B., & Hart, E. (2021). Enhancing the practicality of tools to estimate the whole life embodied carbon of building structures via machine-learning models. Frontiers in Built Environment, 7, Article 745598. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbuil.2021.745598

The construction and operation of buildings account for significant environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, energy demand, resource consumption and waste generation. While the operation of buildings is fairly well regulated a... Read More about Enhancing the practicality of tools to estimate the whole life embodied carbon of building structures via machine-learning models.

Generating Unambiguous and Diverse Referring Expressions   (2020)
Journal Article
Panagiaris, N., Hart, E., & Gkatzia, D. (2021). Generating Unambiguous and Diverse Referring Expressions  . Computer Speech and Language, 68, Article 101184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csl.2020.101184

Neural Referring Expression Generation (REG) models have shown promising results in generating expressions which uniquely describe visual objects. However, current REG models still lack the ability to produce diverse and unambiguous referring express... Read More about Generating Unambiguous and Diverse Referring Expressions  .

Bootstrapping artificial evolution to design robots for autonomous fabrication (2020)
Journal Article
Buchanan, E., Le Goff, L. K., Li, W., Hart, E., Eiben, A. E., De Carlo, M., Winfield, A., Hale, M. F., Woolley, R., Angus, M., Timmis, J., & Tyrrell, A. M. (2020). Bootstrapping artificial evolution to design robots for autonomous fabrication. Robotics, 9(4), Article 106. https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics9040106

A long-term vision of evolutionary robotics is a technology enabling the evolution of entire autonomous robotic ecosystems that live and work for long periods in challenging and dynamic environments without the need for direct human oversight. Evolut... Read More about Bootstrapping artificial evolution to design robots for autonomous fabrication.

From disorganized equality to efficient hierarchy: how group size drives the evolution of hierarchy in human societies (2020)
Journal Article
Perret, C., Hart, E., & Powers, S. T. (2020). From disorganized equality to efficient hierarchy: how group size drives the evolution of hierarchy in human societies. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 287(1928), Article 20200693. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.0693

A manifest trend is that larger and more productive human groups shift from distributed to centralized decision-making. Voluntary theories propose that human groups shift to hierarchy to limit scalar stress, i.e. the increase in cost of organization... Read More about From disorganized equality to efficient hierarchy: how group size drives the evolution of hierarchy in human societies.

Using MAP-Elites to support policy making around Workforce Scheduling and Routing (2020)
Journal Article
Urquhart, N., Hart, E., & Hutcheson, W. (2020). Using MAP-Elites to support policy making around Workforce Scheduling and Routing. Automatisierungstechnik, 68(2), https://doi.org/10.1515/auto-2019-0107

English abstract: Algorithms such as MAP-Elites provide a means of allowing users to explore a solution space by returning an archive of high-performing solutions. Such an archive, can allow the user an overview of the solution space which may be use... Read More about Using MAP-Elites to support policy making around Workforce Scheduling and Routing.

A similarity-based neighbourhood search for enhancing the balance exploration–exploitation of differential evolution (2019)
Journal Article
Segredo, E., Lalla-Ruiz, E., Hart, E., & Voß, S. (2020). A similarity-based neighbourhood search for enhancing the balance exploration–exploitation of differential evolution. Computers and Operations Research, 117, Article 104871. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cor.2019.104871

The success of search-based optimisation algorithms depends on appropriately balancing exploration and exploitation mechanisms during the course of the search. We introduce a mechanism that can be used with Differential Evolution (de) algorithms to a... Read More about A similarity-based neighbourhood search for enhancing the balance exploration–exploitation of differential evolution.

Use of machine learning techniques to model wind damage to forests (2018)
Journal Article
Hart, E., Sim, K., Kamimura, K., Meredieu, C., Guyon, D., & Gardiner, B. (2019). Use of machine learning techniques to model wind damage to forests. Agricultural and forest meteorology, 265, 16-29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2018.10.022

This paper tested the ability of machine learning techniques, namely artificial neural networks and random forests, to predict the individual trees within a forest most at risk of damage in storms. Models based on these techniques were developed i... Read More about Use of machine learning techniques to model wind damage to forests.

Selection methods and diversity preservation in many-objective evolutionary algorithms (2018)
Journal Article
Martí, L., Segredo, E., Sánchez-Pi, N., & Hart, E. (2018). Selection methods and diversity preservation in many-objective evolutionary algorithms. Data Technologies and Applications, https://doi.org/10.1108/dta-01-2018-0009

Purpose – One of the main components of multi-objective, and therefore, many-objective evolutionary algorithms is the selection mechanism. It is responsible for performing two main tasks simultaneously. First, it has to promote convergence by selecti... Read More about Selection methods and diversity preservation in many-objective evolutionary algorithms.

On the performance of the hybridisation between migrating birds optimisation variants and differential evolution for large scale continuous problems (2018)
Journal Article
Voß, S., Segredo, E., Lalla-Ruiz, E., Hart, E., & Voss, S. (2018). On the performance of the hybridisation between migrating birds optimisation variants and differential evolution for large scale continuous problems. Expert Systems with Applications, 102, 126-142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2018.02.024

Migrating Birds Optimisation (mbo) is a nature-inspired approach which has been shown to be very effective when solving a variety of combinatorial optimisation problems. More recently, an adaptation of the algorithm has been proposed that enables it... Read More about On the performance of the hybridisation between migrating birds optimisation variants and differential evolution for large scale continuous problems.

On Constructing Ensembles for Combinatorial Optimisation (2017)
Journal Article
Hart, E., & Sim, K. (2018). On Constructing Ensembles for Combinatorial Optimisation. Evolutionary Computation, 26(1), 67-87. https://doi.org/10.1162/evco_a_00203

Although the use of ensemble methods in machine-learning is ubiquitous due to their proven ability to outperform their constituent algorithms, ensembles of optimisation algorithms have received relatively little attention. Existing approaches lag beh... Read More about On Constructing Ensembles for Combinatorial Optimisation.