fberlinger / turing_learning_for_collective_behaviors

Turing learning as a method for an autonomous agent to learn schooling behavior from observations

Teach a fish to swim: Evaluating the ability of turing learning to infer schooling behavior

My student Katherine Binney evaluated turing learning as a method for an autonomous agent to learn schooling behavior from observations. She used a 2D version of my fastsim simulation to generate large amounts of training data for different schooling behaviors. Find her full Bachelor's Thesis katherine_binney_thesis.pdf in the repo.

Abstract

Turing Learning is a promising evolutionary design method for swarm robotics that uses observation of natural or artificial systems to infer controllers for agents in a swarm. However, Turing Learning has thus far only been used to infer very simple swarm behaviors. In this work, we expand Turing Learning to infer dispersion, a much more complex swarm behavior, by a simulated school of robotic fish. Turing Learning depends on the co-evolution of replicas and classifiers. Replicas mimic ideal behavior and classifiers distinguish between data samples from replica and ideal agents. We model replicas and classifiers with neural networks and investigate the architecture of each component independently in order to determine needed modifications to Turing Learning for it to infer fish schooling. We find that previously formulated data samples led to the inference of behaviors that locally mimicked the agent trajectories in dispersion, yet poorly mimicked dispersion of an entire swarm. We present three alternative data samples that consider the spatial arrangement of agents in a swarm. We also introduce three new classifier fitness functions that accelerate evolution of high-accuracy classifiers. We find in a preliminary trial that using one of our data samples (metrics) and classifier fitness functions (f_outputs) enables the successful inference of dispersion via Turing Learning.