Student opportunities

Evolutionary Robotics

Voxel-based soft robots (VSRs)
- Co-evolution of body and brain of VSRs
- Learning techniques for the controllers of VSRs: reinforcement learning
- Auto-assembly of VSRs
- Resolution-agnostic representation for evolution of closed-loop controllers of VSRs
- Improving scalability of VSR controller learning with Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolutionary Strategies (CMA-ES)
- Learning and pruning techniques for improving robustness to damages of VSR controllers
- Modularity of VSRs as robotic tissue
- Human control of VSRs with a brain-computer interface
- Novelty in perception for driving optimization of VSRs controller
Real robots
- Design and development of an sw framework for experimenting with learning techniques
- Hybrid (real vs. simulated) controller learning for addressing the reality gap
- Reality-gap in multi-agent systems with communication
- PushGP on mobile robots (Thymio-II): a machine-friendly representation for robotic agents controllers

Multi-agent systems
- Evolution of behavioral rules for multi-agent systems: the case of self-driving cars
Development of an Artificial Life simulator for investigating the Alife-Human interactions