Alexis Kirke

ORCID

Abstract

This thesis addresses the problem of setting the balance between exploration and exploitation in teams of learning robots who exchange information. Specifically it looks at groups of robots whose tasks include moving between salient points in the environment. To deal with unknown and dynamic environments,such robots need to be able to discover and learn the routes between these points themselves. A natural extension of this scenario is to allow the robots to exchange learned routes so that only one robot needs to learn a route for the whole team to use that route. One contribution of this thesis is to identify a dilemma created by this extension: that once one robot has learned a route between two points, all other robots will follow that route without looking for shorter versions. This trade-off will be labeled the Distributed Exploration vs. Exploitation Dilemma, since increasing distributed exploitation (allowing robots to exchange more routes) means decreasing distributed exploration (reducing robots ability to learn new versions of routes), and vice-versa. At different times, teams may be required with different balances of exploitation and exploration. The main contribution of this thesis is to present a system for setting the balance between exploration and exploitation in a group of robots. This system is demonstrated through experiments involving simulated robot teams. The experiments show that increasing and decreasing the value of a parameter of the novel system will lead to a significant increase and decrease respectively in average exploitation (and an equivalent decrease and increase in average exploration) over a series of team missions. A further set of experiments show that this holds true for a range of team sizes and numbers of goals.

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Date

1997

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