Evolutionary approaches to neural control in mobile robots

This article is centered on the application of evolutionary techniques to the automatic design of neural controllers for mobile robots. About 30 papers are reviewed and classified in a framework that takes into account the specific robots involved, the behaviors that are evolved, the characteristics of the corresponding neural controllers, how these controllers are genetically encoded, and whether or not an individual learning process complements evolution. Related research efforts in evolutionary robotics are occasionally cited. If it is yet unclear whether such approaches will scale up with increasing complexity, foreseeable bottlenecks and prospects of improvement are discussed in the text.