Incorporating User Feedback in Embodied Evolution

We investigate the possibilities of incorporating user feedback at run-time in an embodied evolution setting. User feedback in this case consists of a user ranking a small sample from the population in an ongoing evolutionary process according to some criterion. We describe an approach to develop a surrogate model, disseminate that model across the evolving robot collective and incorporate it as an additional objective during the evolutionary run. We evaluate the method in a number of scenarios, showing that this approach does to some extent cause the collective to absorb new objectives, including objectives to refrain from particular behaviour, but not to the level that is achieved by explicitly adding the true objective function.