Diversity in swarm robotics with task-independent behavior characterization

Evolutionary computation provides methods to automatically generate controllers for swarm robotics. Many approaches rely on optimization and the targeted behavior is quantified in form of a fitness function. Other methods, like novelty search, increase exploration by putting selective pressure on unexplored behavior space using a domain-specific behavioral distance function. In contrast, minimize surprise leads to the emergence of diverse behaviors by using an intrinsic motivation as fitness, that is, high prediction accuracy. We compare a standard genetic algorithm, novelty search and minimize surprise in a swarm robotics setting to evolve diverse behaviors and show that minimize surprise is competitive to novelty search.