Evolving robot gaits in hardware: the HyperNEAT generative encoding vs. parameter optimization

Creating gaits for legged robots is an important task to enable robots to access rugged terrain, yet designing such gaits by hand is a challenging and time-consuming process. In this paper we investigate various algorithms for automating the creation of quadruped gaits. Because many robots do not have accurate simulators, we test gait-learning algorithms entirely on a physical robot. We compare the performance of two classes of gait-learning algorithms: locally searching parameterized motion models and evolving artificial neural networks with the HyperNEAT generative encoding. Specifically, we test six different parameterized learning strategies: uniform and Gaussian random hill climbing, policy gradient reinforcement learning, Nelder-Mead simplex, a random baseline, and a new method that builds a model of the fitness landscape with linear regression to guide further exploration. While all parameter search methods outperform a manually-designed gait, only the linear regression and Nelder-Mead simplex strategies outperform a random baseline strategy. Gaits evolved with HyperNEAT perform considerably better than all parameterized local search methods and produce gaits nearly 9 times faster than a hand-designed gait. The best HyperNEAT gaits exhibit complex motion patterns that contain multiple frequencies, yet are regular in that the leg movements are coordinated. Introduction and Background Legged robots have the potential to access many types of terrain unsuitable for wheeled robots, but doing so requires the creation of a gait specifying how the robot walks. Such gaits may be designed either manually by an expert or via computer learning algorithms. It is advantageous to automatically learn gaits because doing so can save valuable engineering time and allows gaits to be customized to the idiosyncrasies of different robots. Additionally, learned gaits have outperformed engineered gaits in some cases (Hornby et al., 2005; Valsalam and Miikkulainen, 2008). In this paper we compare the performance of two different methods of learning gaits: parameterized gaits optimized with six different learning methods, and gaits generated by evolving neural networks with the HyperNEAT generative encoding (Stanley et al., 2009). While some of these Figure 1: The quadruped robot for which gaits were evolved. The translucent parts were produced by a 3D printer. Videos of the gaits can be viewed at http://bit.ly/ecalgait methods, such as HyperNEAT, have been tested in simulation (Clune et al., 2009a, 2011), we investigate how they perform when evolving on a physical robot (Figure 1). Previous work has shown that quadruped gaits perform better when they are regular (i.e. when the legs are coordinated) (Clune et al., 2009a, 2011; Valsalam and Miikkulainen, 2008). For example, HyperNEAT produced fast, natural gaits in part because its bias towards regular gaits created coordinated movements that outperformed gaits evolved by an encoding not biased towards regularity (Clune et al., 2009a, 2011). One of the motivations of this paper is to investigate whether any learning method biased towards regularity would perform well at producing quadruped gaits, or whether HyperNEAT’s high performance is due to additional factors, such as its abstraction of biological development (described below). We test this hypothesis by comparing HyperNEAT to six local search algorithms with a parametrization biased toward regularity. An additional motivation is to test whether techniques for evolving gaits in simulation, especially cutting-edge evolutionary algorithms, transfer to reality well. Because HyperNEAT gaits performed well in simulation, it is interesting to test whether HyperNEAT can produce fast gaits for a physical robot, including handling the noisy, unforgiving nature of the real world. Such tests help us better understand the real world implications of results reported only in simulation. It is additionally interesting to test how more traditional gait optimization techniques compete with evolutionary algorithms when evolving in hardware. A final motivation of this research is simply to evolve effective gaits for a physical robot.