Emergence of Autonomous Behaviors of Virtual Characters through Simulated Reproduction

This paper addresses the problem of autonomous behaviors of virtual characters. We postulate that a behavior is regarded as autonomous when the actions performed by the agent result from the interaction between its internal dynamics and the environment, rather than being externally controlled. In this work, we argue that an autonomous behavior is an agent’s solution to a given problem, which is obtained through a process of self-organization of the dynamics of a system that is composed of the agent’s controller, its body and the environment. That process allows the emergence of complex behaviors without any description of actions or objectives. We show a technique capable of adapting an artificial neural network to consistently control virtual Khepera-like robots by means of simulated reproduction, with no measure of the robots’ fitness. All the robots are either male or female, and they are capable of evolving different kinds of behaviors according to their own characteristics, guided solely by the environment’s dynamics.