Directed Learning-based Evolutionary Approach for Legged Robot Motion

At any stage of development, any organism is required to go through a learning phase as a way to acquire and enhance certain skills. Similarly, legged robots perform a learning phase to obtain basic skills before implementing them in real specific applications. Walking skills are one of the first capabilities that need to be learned, as this allows the robots to traverse their environment. This work proposes A Directed Evolutionary Algorithm Learning method – which we henceforth refer to as the DEAL method. This method aims to direct the learning process by incorporating the robot learning experience, and hence, to reduce the time period required for the learning process to converge to a framed optimal solution. This will reduce the deployment time of the robot and as a result, the learning process will have a minimal impact on the wear and tear of the robot body and maximise the life of the robot when it is deployed on specific applications.