Improving Survivability In Environment-Driven Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms Through Explicit Relative Fitness And Fitness Proportionate Communication

Ensuring the integrity of a robot swarm in terms of maintaining a stable population of functioning robots over long periods of time is a mandatory prerequisite for building more complex systems that achieve user-defined tasks. mEDEA is an environment-driven evolutionary algorithm that provides promising results using an implicit fitness function combined with a random genome selection operator. Motivated by the need to sustain a large population with sufficient spare energy to carry out user-defined tasks in the future, we develop an explicit fitness metric providing a measure of fitness that is relative to surrounding robots and examine two methods by which it can influence spread of genomes. Experimental results in simulation find that use of the fitness-function provides significant improvements over the original algorithm; in particular, a method that influences the frequency and range of broadcasting when combined with random selection has the potential to conserve energy whilst maintaining performance, a critical factor for physical robots.