27 May 2010

Here we conducted a trial in which each robot alternates between teacher and learner, and enacts the most recently seen meme. Initially epuck9 is in teacher mode, and epuck12 in learner mode, and epuck9’s memory has been preloaded with a movement sequence that describes a square with sides of 25cm. The trial illustrated takes about 20 minutes and consists of about twelve complete cycles, i.e. six teacher–learner imitation events per robot.

The annotated tracking plot above (from Excel) show the initial square (epuck9), and the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation copies. It is clear that there is significant imitation error resulting in variation in the movement-memes, which quickly degenerate into significantly distorted variants of the original square. However, the number of segments remains at four until the robots become too far apart to see each other (and the experiment is halted), thus there is an inherited characteristic in this very simple example of movement-meme evolution.