A unified architecture for agent behaviors with selection of evolved neural network modules

To model complex systems for agent behaviors, genetic algorithms have been used to evolve neural networks which are based on cellular automata. These neural networks are popular tools in the artificial life community. This hybrid architecture aims at achieving synergy between the cellular automata and the powerful generalization capabilities of the neural networks. Evolutionary algorithms provide useful ways to learn about the structure of these neural networks, but the use of direct evolution in more difficult and complicated problems often fails to achieve satisfactory solutions. A more promising solution is to employ incremental evolution that reuses the solutions of easy tasks and applies these solutions to more difficult ones. Moreover, because the human brain can be divided into many behaviors with specific functionalities and because human beings can integrate these behaviors for high-level tasks, a biologically-inspired behavior selection mechanism is useful when combining these incrementally evolving basic behaviors. In this paper, an architecture based on cellular automata, neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, incremental evolution and a behavior selection mechanism is proposed to generate high-level behaviors for mobile robots. Experimental results with several simulations show the possibilities of the proposed architecture.