Engineering Commons^™

Evolving Neural Networks Applied To Predator-Evader Problem, Shivakumar Viswanathan, Ilker Ersoy, Filiz Bunyak, Cihan H. Dagli

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The creation of strategies to meet abstract goals is an important behavior exhibited by natural organisms. A situation requiring the development of such strategies is the predator-evader problem. To study this problem, Khepera robots are chosen as the competing agents. Using computer simulations the evolution of the adaptive behavior is studied in a predator-evader interaction. A bilaterally symmetrical multilayer perceptron neural network architecture with evolvable weights is used to model the “brains” of the agents. Evolutionary programming is employed to evolve the predator for developing adaptive strategies to meet its goals. To study the effect of learning on evolution a …