We generalize the well-studied problem of gait learning in modular robots in two dimensions. Firstly, we address locomotion in a given target direction that goes beyond learning a typical undirected gait. Secondly, rather than studying one fixed robot morphology we consider a test suite of different modular robots. This study is based on our interest in evolutionary robot systems where both morphologies and controllers evolve. In such a system, newborn robots have to learn to control their own body that is a random combination of the bodies of the parents. We apply and compare two learning algorithms, Bayesian optimization and HyperNEAT. The results of the experiments in simulation show that both methods successfully learn good controllers, but Bayesian optimization is more effective and efficient. We validate the best learned controllers by constructing three robots from the test suite in the real world and observe their fitness and actual trajectories. The obtained results indicate a reality gap that depends on the controllers and the shape of the robots, but overall the trajectories are adequate and follow the target directions successfully.

Birds do not collide when they fly in flocks. We may wonder how they do not and how they flock in a self-organized and well-orchestrated movement. It is a collective intelligence that is encapsulated within the interactions between the birds and the environment. The cohesive self-organized movement of a biological swarm such as flocking birds is commonly studied. Such phenomena have had successful applications in robotics and autonomous vehicles, and it has attracted a renewed interest from the Artificial Intelligence and the Predictive Analytics communities.

Architectural patterns provide a reusable architectural solution for commonly recurring problems that can assist in designing software systems. In this regard, self-awareness architectural patterns are specialized patterns that leverage good engineering practices and experiences to help in designing self-awareness and self-adaptation of a software system. However, domain knowledge and engineers' expertise that is built over time are not explicitly linked to these patterns and the self-aware process. This linkage is important, as it can enrich the design patterns of these systems, which consequently leads to more effective and efficient self-aware and self-adaptive behaviours. This paper is an introductory work that highlights the importance of synergizing domain expertise into the self-awareness in software systems, relying on well-defined underlying approaches. In particular, we present a holistic framework that classifies widely known representations used to obtain and maintain the domain expertise, documenting their nature and specifics rules that permits different levels of synergies with self-awareness. Drawing on such, we describe mechanisms that can enrich existing patterns with engineers' expertise and knowledge of the domain. This, together with the framework, allow us to codify an intuitive step-by-step methodology that guides engineer in making design decisions when synergizing domain expertise into self-awareness and reveal their importances, in an attempt to keep 'engineers-in-the-loop'. Through three case studies, we demonstrate how the enriched patterns, the proposed framework and methodology can be applied in different domains, within which we quantitatively compare the actual benefits of incorporating engineers' expertise into self-awareness, at alternative levels of synergies.

Recent studies on resource allocation suggest that some subproblems are more important than others in the context of the MOEA/D, and that focusing on the most relevant ones can consistently improve the performance of that algorithm. These studies share the common characteristic of updating only a fraction of the population at any given iteration of the algorithm. In this work we investigate a new, simpler partial update strategy, in which a random subset of solutions is selected at every iteration. The performance of the MOEA/D using this new resource allocation approach is compared experimentally against that of the standard MOEA/D-DE and the MOEA/D with relative improvement-based resource allocation. The results indicate that using the MOEA/D with this new partial update strategy results in improved HV and IGD values, and a much higher proportion of non-dominated solutions, particularly as the number of updated solutions at every iteration is reduced.

Device to Device (D2D) Communication is one of the technology components of the evolving 5G architecture, as it promises improvements in energy efficiency, spectral efficiency, overall system capacity, and higher data rates. The above noted improvements in network performance spearheaded a vast amount of research in D2D, which have identified significant challenges that need to be addressed before realizing their full potential in emerging 5G Networks. Towards this end, this paper proposes the use of a distributed intelligent approach to control the generation of D2D networks. More precisely, the proposed approach uses Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) intelligent agents with extended capabilities (BDIx) to manage each D2D node independently and autonomously, without the help of the Base Station. The paper includes detailed algorithmic description for the decision of transmission mode, which maximizes the data rate, minimizes the power consumptions, while taking into consideration the computational load. Simulations show the applicability of BDI agents in jointly solving D2D challenges.

With the rapid development of virtualization techniques, cloud data centers allow for cost effective, flexible, and customizable deployments of applications on virtualized infrastructure. Virtual machine (VM) placement aims to assign each virtual machine to a server in the cloud environment. VM Placement is of paramount importance to the design of cloud data centers. Typically, VM placement involves complex relations and multiple design factors as well as local policies that govern the assignment decisions. It also involves different constituents including cloud administrators and customers that might have disparate preferences while opting for a placement solution. Thus, it is often valuable to not only return an optimized solution to the VM placement problem but also a solution that reflects the given preferences of the constituents. In this paper, we provide a detailed review on the role of preferences in the recent literature on VM placement. We further discuss key challenges and identify possible research opportunities to better incorporate preferences within the context of VM placement.

Intelligent Object manipulation for grasping is a challenging problem for robots. Unlike robots, humans almost immediately know how to manipulate objects for grasping due to learning over the years. A grown woman can grasp objects more skilfully than a child because of learning skills developed over years, the absence of which in the present day robotic grasping compels it to perform well below the human object grasping benchmarks. In this paper we have taken up the challenge of developing learning based pose estimation by decomposing the problem into both position and orientation learning. More specifically, for grasp position estimation, we explore three different methods - a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based optimization method to minimize error between calculated image points and predicted end-effector (EE) position, a regression based method (RM) where collected data points of robot EE and image points have been regressed with a linear model, a PseudoInverse (PI) model which has been formulated in the form of a mapping matrix with robot EE position and image points for several observations. Further for grasp orientation learning, we develop a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) model which we name as Grasp Deep Q-Network (GDQN) and benchmarked our results with Modified VGG16 (MVGG16). Rigorous experimentations show that due to inherent capability of producing very high-quality solutions for optimization problems and search problems, GA based predictor performs much better than the other two models for position estimation. For orientation learning results indicate that off policy learning through GDQN outperforms MVGG16, since GDQN architecture is specially made suitable for the reinforcement learning. Based on our proposed architectures and algorithms, the robot is capable of grasping all rigid body objects having regular shapes.

Traveling salesman problem ( TSP) is a well-known in computing field. There are many researches to improve the genetic algorithm for solving TSP. In this paper, we propose two new crossover operators and new mechanism of combination crossover operators in genetic algorithm for solving TSP. We experimented on TSP instances from TSP -Lib and compared the results of proposed algorithm with genetic algorithm ( GA), which used MSCX. Experimental results show that, our proposed algorithm is better than the GA using MSCX on the min, mean cost values.

This work aims to study and explore the use of Gene Expression Programming (GEP) in solving the on-line Bin-Packing problem. The main idea is to show how GEP can automatically find acceptable heuristic rules to solve the problem efficiently and economically. One dimensional Bin-Packing problem is considered in the course of this work with the constraint of minimizing the number of bins filled with the given pieces. Experimental Data includes instances of benchmark test data taken from Falkenauer (1996) for One-dimensional Bin-Packing Problems. Results show that GEP can be used as a very powerful and flexible tool for finding interesting compact rules suited for the problem. The impact of functions is also investigated to show how they can affect and influence the success of rates when they appear in rules. High success rates are gained with smaller population size and fewer generations compared to previous work performed using Genetic Programming.

In this research, an extensive literature review was performed on the recent developments of the ambulance routing problem (ARP) and ambulance location problem (ALP). Both are respective modifications of the vehicle routing problem (VRP) and maximum covering problem (MCP), with modifications to objective functions and constraints. Although alike, a key distinction is emergency service systems (EMS) are considered critical and the optimization of these has become all the more important as a result. Similar to their parent problems, these are NP-hard and must resort to approximations if the space size is too large. Much of the current work has simply been on modifying existing systems through simulation to achieve a more acceptable result. There has been attempts towards using meta-heuristics, though practical experimentation is lacking when compared to VRP or MCP. The contributions of this work are a comprehensive survey of current methodologies, summarized models, and suggested future improvements.