20 Years of Reality Gap: a few Thoughts about Simulators in Evolutionary Robotics

Jean-Baptiste Mouret (1) , Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis (1)

1 LARSEN - Lifelong Autonomy and interaction skills for Robots in a Sensing ENvironment

Simulators in Evolutionary Robotics (ER) are often considered as a "temporary evil" until experiments can be conducted on real robots. Yet, aaer more than 20 years of ER, most experiments still happen in simulation and nothing suggests that this situation will change in the next few years. In this short paper, we describe the requirements of ER from simulators, what we tried, and how we successfully crossed the "reality gap" in many experiments. We argue that future simulators need to be able to estimate their conndence when they predict a tness value, so that behaviors that are not accurately simulated can be avoided.

Mots clés: Simulation; Evolutionary algorithms; Evolutionary robotics

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Robotique [cs.RO]; Automatique / Robotique

Jean-Baptiste Mouret, Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis. 20 Years of Reality Gap: a few Thoughts about Simulators in Evolutionary Robotics. Workshop "Simulation in Evolutionary Robotics", Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, 2017, Berlin, Germany. ⟨10.1145/3067695.3082052⟩. ⟨hal-01518764⟩