Evolution of self-organized task specialization in robot swarms

Division of labor is ubiquitous in biological systems, as evidenced by various forms of complex task specialization observed in both animal societies and multicellular organisms. Although clearly adaptive, the way in which division of labor first evolved remains enigmatic, as it requires the simultaneous co-occurrence of several complex traits to achieve the required degree of coordination. Recently, evolutionary swarm robotics has emerged as an excellent test bed to study the evolution of coordinated group-level behavior. Here we use this framework for the first time to study the evolutionary origin of behavioral task specialization among groups of identical robots. The scenario we study involves an advanced form of division of labor, common in insect societies and known as “task partitioning”, whereby two sets of tasks have to be carried out in sequence by different individuals. Our results show that task partitioning is favored whenever the environment has features that, when exploit...

生物系统中的劳动分工（division of labor）无处不在，动物社会与多细胞生物中观测到的各类复杂任务特化现象均可作为佐证。尽管劳动分工显然具备适应性，但它最初的演化起源仍充满谜团——因为要实现所需的协调程度，需要同时兼具多项复杂性状。近年来，演化集群机器人学（evolutionary swarm robotics）已成为研究协同群体行为演化的绝佳实验平台。本研究首次借助该框架，探究同质机器人群体中行为任务特化的演化起源。我们所研究的场景涉及一种在昆虫社会中常见的高级劳动分工形式，即“任务划分（task partitioning）”，该模式要求两类任务需由不同个体按顺序完成。我们的研究结果表明，当环境具备可供利用的特征时……