Evolutionary design of specialization

In this research, a neuro-evolution method called Collective Neuro-Evolution (CONE), is introduced for the design of neural controllers (agents) operating in collective behavior task domains. The efficacy of the CONE method for facilitating emergent behavioral specialization for the benefit of increasing task performance is tested in a pursuit-evasion and collective gathering task. For a comparative study, a conventional neuroevolution method was applied to the same tasks. In both tasks, the CONE method derived behavioral specialization in groups of agents resulting in higher task performances, where as the conventional neuro-evolution method was unable to derive specialization resulting in comparatively lower task performances.